Legends of Tomorrow - 'Fail-Safe'

"My shirtless scenes in Arrow were way more fun than this."

While Valentina Vostok* tries to extract the secrets of the Firestorm matrix from Stein, Mick Roary tries and fails to keep nice-guy pretty-boy Ray from getting beaten up in Soviet supermax. The rest of the team starts to put together a rescue plan by strongarming the Bratva and persuading them to help destroy Vandal Savage's operation. Sensing Stein's flagging hope of rescue, Jax has Kendra cut the message 'we're coming' into his arm to be transferred to Stein.

With persuasion and trickery proving ineffective, Savage turns to torture to loosen Stein's tongue; not of Stein, but of Roary and Ray. Ray takes a beating for Roary by taunting their torturer and is left almost comatose.

Sara and Snart infiltrate the prison. Rip gives Sara instructions to kill Stein if necessary, showing her a future projection of Star City destroyed by an army of Soviet Firestorms if the secret is unlocked. Snart suggests that this is a pretty cold-blooded approach, and when Leonard Snart is calling you for being a bastard, you know you're in trouble. Meanwhile Kendra and Jax smart at not being allowed to take part in the rescue since Savage needs them both.

"For the culmination of my military scientific research, I am thinking tight
leather and a low-cut top."

Vostok realises that Firestorm is a binary entity when she sees Stein's arm, and despite his protests that the result will be unstable, she dresses up all sexy (apparently feeling this is a situation for her best clubbing gear,) exposes herself to the thermal core and forces a fusion with Stein to become the first Soviet Firestorm.

Sara declines to kill Stein and Rip allows Kendra and Jax to join the mission, realising that they need to be a team. Snart finds Roary, and Roary refuses to leave Ray to fend for himself.

"He took a beating for me."
"It's Ray; he'd take a beating for a total stranger."

Jax manages to inspire Stein's consciousness to block Vostok's powers and forces him out of the matrix, while Kendra and Rip blow up Savage and his accumulated Firestorm research. With neither a partner nor a quantum splicer, Vostok goes nuclear, bringing the team's kill score into the triple digits. I'm just saying.

It's (not) that man again.

The team chill and discuss what they were and what they are. Sara is no longer an assassin, and Roary isn't a completely self-centred arse; just mostly. The touching moment is interrupted when Kronus pops up and starts shooting missiles at them in the time stream, knocking them into a crash landing in Star City, c.2046. Here they are confronted by a blasted city dominated by the apparently pristine Smoak tower, and a hooded archer who doesn't know them.

Now, the ending confuses me a little. Sara and Ray are all 'Olly; don't you remember us?' which seems odd given that they've been told it's 2046, which means Olly would be sixty two years old, which this guy clearly isn't. Ah well, I guess they're new to this time travel lark.

'Fail-Safe' scores over 'White Knights' by getting more of the team involved. Once more, Ray is the whipping boy, and I hope he can get some proper hero moments later on. Vostok's Soviet rhetoric is an interesting flashback to Cold War movies (she accepts that launching a Firestorm attack would trigger an American nuclear response, but believes that superior Soviet grit would see them emerge from the nuclear winter dominant,) and I was glad that Stein at least admits that the US of his time is imperfect.

Next week, we get our first future trip, so that should be interesting.

* Soviet ice-maiden named after a subglacial Antarctic lake; subtle