Legends of Tomorrow - 'White Knights'

Moscow in the Springtime.

With Kendra now able to travel, it's time for the team to jump forward to the 1980s, although the threatened parachute pants never appear as, after a stop off at the Pentagon, they're heading for Soviet Moscow.

The Pentagon heist is a lively opener which once more shows up the gaps in the team's working relationships. Initially slick, Jax's impatience with Stein's pedantic guidance (and inexperience with the difference between direct and alternating current) triggers a chain of chaos which ends with a lot of fire and Kendra going berserk on an unsuspecting guard.

As the Waverider heads for Moscow in pursuit of the now defected Savage (in as much as a 4,000 year old Ancient Egyptian can be said to have defected from or to either side in the Cold War,) Rip tasks Sara with training Kendra to hone her skills and harness her hawk-goddess* bloodlust, in the hopes of gaining a handle on her own. This is essentially busywork, however, to keep the characters occupied while the rest of the team does the A-plot. I'd be more annoyed at the women being sidelined if the men made a better showing.

Identifying a hot Russian scientist working on Savage's 'Project Svarog', Ray tries to tap his inner James Bond, but blows it completely. I strongly suspect that Ray would be a more effective superhero if Brandon Routh didn't do such an adorable woobie face when things go wrong for the Atom. Instead, it's Snart who steps in to romance Valentina Vostok and lift her wallet and security ID so that the team can investigate Project Svarog.

22. No matter how tempted I am by the prospect of unlimited power, I will
never attempt to absorb an energy field bigger than my head.

During the meanwhile, the Waverider is attacked by Kronus and forced to make a crash landing (which causes almost no significant damage,) although Rip is able to dummy a pair of Soviet heat-seekers into shooting down Kronus' time ship. When Rip and Roary go to eliminate a temporal anomaly from the ship, they find Druce, a Time Master who offers to return the team to their origin if Rip turns himself in. Rip is inclined to trust his old friend and mentor, but Roary smells a set up. The team thwarts an ambush set up by Druce and Kronus, but Jax is injured, precipitating another clash between the two halves of Firestorm. Stein reveals that he lives in terror of letting another partner be killed the way Ronnie Raymond was.

Breaking into the Svarog lab, Stein realises that Savage is trying to create his own version of Firestorm. Encountering the team has prompted him to enter a superheroic arms race, from stealing the power of the slaughtered incarnations of Hawkman and Hawkgirl to attempting to back engineer the Atom suit, and now duplicating the powers of the next heavy hitter on the list. Stein attempts to disable the Svarog thermal core, but Ray is such an Eagle Scout that he manages to sidetrack Snart into trying to save the girl, only to discover that Vostok knows exactly what she's doing, and forces Ray to sabotage Stein's sabotage on threat of shooting Snart in the face.

Snart gets away, but Roary, Ray and Stein are captured, netting two of the team's heavy hitters and disabling a third, as well as dropping Mick's heat gun into the waiting hands of Savage's technicians. Snart is furious with Rip for pulling the plug and leaving members of his crew behind, but Rip swears that they will get them back.

So, we now have a pattern emerging, in which each time zone gets a couple of episodes, a time-appropriate plot and an entry in the Legendary arms race. 'White Knights' - a title which I presume both refers to Ray's compulsion to protect Valentina Vostok and to the ballet defection drama White Nights** - has proven a polarising episode among critics, with some praising the action but criticising the yoyoing relationship between Stein and Jax, and others liking the Firestorm drama but finding the A-plot tepid. Almost universal is dissatisfaction with sidelining Kendra and Sara for the episode, especially given that one of the most successful scenes was the all too brief full-team Pentagon heist***, while Brandon Routh's kicked puppy face has met with widespread acclaim.

Having done the bulk of the set up, it feels as if we should be past most of the 'should we be doing this' drama and into the 'how do we do this' and 'how do we reconcile the different methods and priorities of the team' area. Unfortunately, we're still working to some extent on 'who is this Kendra woman and what's her deal,' Hawkgirl being the character least established in her previous appearances and her interactions with Carter Hall less than gripping. She's currently the outlier and a weak link in the team, present only because she can kill Savage given an opportunity. The other weak link is Rip, simply because he lacks context. The business with Druce desperately called for some flashbacks**** to establish Rip's prior relationship with the other Time Masters, especially Druce, and with Kronus.

In short, I like the A-plot just fine, but elsewhere it feels like we're setting up instead of moving forward, and telling where we should be showing.

* They've just started dropping the G word in there, and it occurs to me that they have not otherwise explained why being a reincarnated Egyptian priestess gives you wings. 
** I don't know the film well enough to say if the performance attended by Vostok, Snart and Ray was related.
*** I honestly would not mind much if the show was just Leverage in Time, with time travel shenanigans instead of flashbacks.
**** I can't believe I'm suggesting that a show in the Arrowverse needs more flashbacks, but it kind of does. It would even open the way for some nifty metahumour if they accidentally changed the course of history and did the same flashback but with a different resolution.