Legends of Tomorrow - 'Moonshot'

This is totally mission control. Totally.

Man, what is with all the moon stuff lately. The fiftieth anniversary isn't for another two years.

So, Rip takes the team to find Commander Steel in 1970, where he has joined NASA in order to get his patriotic hero fix. He's working in mission control for the Apollo 13 mission when they find him and he decks Rip for messing up his life, but soon they realise that they have to work together, because Houston, we don't have a problem. Eobard Thawne has impersonated backup astronaut Jack Swigert and incapacitated the rest of the crew, but other than that the mission is on course and Thawne intends to recover the flag from Tranquility Base, the pole of which contains the final section of the Spear of Destiny, because of course it does.

As an aside, I have no idea how Thawne knows this, because Rip doesn't and he lost the compass, and has not had his fellow bads torture Commander Steel, who is literally the only person who knows where the fragment is.

But anyway, the Legends pursue Apollo 13 in the Waverider and Ray manages to sneak aboard. Thawne spots him, but his Speed doesn't work in space, apparently, and Ray is able to put him down.

I also have literally no idea where this comes from, especially as it is literally space and not – as stated – zero-G, as Thawne speed still doesn't work on the Moon or in the Waverider's artificial G.  

Steel wants to go back after they finish here and be with his family, instead of them thinking that he died in Leipzig, and Nate is torn. He wants to have a proper Dad, but Amaya points out that the upbringing that he had made him the man he is, without whom the rest of the team might never have been rescued from history. Amaya is having troubles of her own, as she learns that she has her own destiny which doesn't involve long-term time travel or, apparently, self-determination. Predestination is such a tool.

One's a pathological speedster serial killer, one's a relentlessly altruistic
scientist; it's like a bloody sitcom.

Ray gets the Spear, but the landing module uses up its fuel in the descent and the Waverider is too banged up protecting the module from a meteor storm to come and collect Ray. Ray and Thawne have to work together to patch Ray's suit power into the module, and when it turns out that someone has to blow the forward airlock to decelerate the Waverider it is Commander Steel who makes the ultimate sacrifice, because that's a control you only want to be able to operate from inside the airlock.

Thawne escapes as his speed returns, but is unable to take the Spear before Black Flash is after him, noting as he departs that he designed Rip's anti-Speedster weapons. Rip confesses to feeling lost now he isn't Captain, but Sara assures him that makes him just like the rest of them. Amaya asks Gideon to show her the shitty future that constitutes her destiny.

'Moonshot' isn't a terrible episode, but is weighed down by uncertainties. How did Thawne find the Spear? Why doesn't his speed work in space and how did Ray know that? Why doesn’t the airlock have a release control on the inside of the inner door, and even if it doesn't, why can't Gideon override? It's possible something critical was damaged. Meteorites do tend to hit the worst possible thing nine times out of ten. And what did the Time Masters pay Rip Hunter for? I get that they need to establish Sara as the better captain, but as is par for the course with these things, they do it by making Rip look like a gibbering incompetent just a week after a run which presented evil Rip as a credible threat to the entire team.

Oh, and Stein, having been taken into mission control as an observer by Commander Steel - a British observer, so he and Jax do accents, although Rory, who is actually played by a man from Cheddar - doesn't - distracts attention from what is happening on Apollo 13 by singing the Banana Boat Song, which is... weird.