Legends of Tomorrow - 'Land of the Lost'

"I love the smell of T-Rex urine in the morning..."

Rip Hunter has been captured by his former teammates, but he was captain of the Waverrider for a long time before he turned evil and he still has some tricks up his sleeve.

Activating crash protocols, he sends the ship plunging through time, then orders a self-destruct and smashes the compass when he is unable to escape. The ship crashes at its earliest ever destination, the cretaceous forest where Ray was being chased by a T-Rex, and the spinny deely from the front of the ship - a vital part of the timey wimey apparatus - falls off and has to be retrieved. Roary suggests that they use that Time Master technique for going inside someone's mind on Rip, which is news to everyone else, but Sara and Jax opt to do the thing and project themselves into Rip's mindscape, which for psychological and budgetary reasons looks exactly like the Waverrider, but with dimmer lighting.

Ray, Nate and Amaya head out to find the deely, which turns out to have ended up in the nest of Ray's old sparring partner, Geraldine the T-Rex, who already holds a grudge against him for nicking one of her actual eggs to make a dozen omelettes. Ray has a hell of an episode, being an adorable prehistoric boyscout with his T-Rex pee defence perimeter and little rock models of his teammates that he made to talk to while he was stranded, and then being all insightful. He tells Nate that he knows there is something between him and Amaya, but that it can't get serious because otherwise Amaya won't go back to her village in her own time, and his friend Mari will never be born to assume the mantle of Vixen and help defeat Damien Darhk. Since this also involves Mari being the only survivor of the village's destruction, it's kind of a bleak reminder of the Legends' responsibilities.

"Why are you hitting yourself? Stop hitting yourself."

Sara and Jax find themselves attacked by evil versions of themselves, created by Eobard Thawne's machinations to control Rip's mind. While they are there, Roary has an unexpected heart to heart with Stein, advising him to view Jax as an equal partner, rather than a student. Sara is thrown in the brig with the weakened core of Rip's true persona, while Jax is unexpectedly aided by an unfamiliar British woman that he realises is a personification of Gideon. Sara convinced Rip that she is on his side, and that his apparent telekinetic powers are a result of this being his mind. Jax and Gideon help them to escape the brig and they confront their evil clones even as the mental construct - now revealed as such - begins to crumble. Rip finds himself, Sara and Jax bail before getting trapped, and Rip cops off with Gideon before coming to.

Didn't this same thing happen to Johnny in Killjoys?

Nate confesses to Ray that he doesn't think he can keep things casual with Amaya after seeing her stare down a T-Rex, but isn't able to break things off quickly either. Gideon hints that her personification in Rip's mind was actually her, not a mere mental projection, but it's a sweet moment rather than hugely awkward.

And in 1970, an astronaut is moved up to the Apollo 13 mission after Ken Mattingly gets sick. The camera pulls back to reveal that the doctor clearing him is Eobard Thawne.

'Land of the Lost' is a solid episode, resolving the Evil Rip subplot with a classic bit of mind-intrusion. The T-Rex is a bit of a sideshow, but Ray's intervention and mention of Mari makes the Nate/Amaya thing much more compelling, because now there are stakes and consequences and other such important narrative things relating to the romance. This is what was ultimately missing from the Ray/Kendra farrago, which had nothing more behind it that the question of Kendra's free will vs. Hawkgirl's destiny (in which destiny won, hands down, implying that Shayera is destined to have Khufu-faced yahoos show up in all her lives and be all 'Don't care who you thought you loved; soulmate in the house, yo!')

And just to say it, I loved that Ray got some character love this week. Not just his moving appeal to Nate on much more solid grounds that not fraternising, but the fact that he noticed. He's so often passed off as clueless, and it was lovely to see his bumbling around the couple revealed to be his way of making sure he didn't walk in on them. Coupled with his immediate understanding of Sara's connection with Guinevere, it shows that the writers haven't condemned him to comic relief hell just yet.