Legends of Tomorrow - 'The Magnificent Eight'

"Just try to blend in."

Fleeing from the Hunters, Rip puts the Waverider down in a fragment, a pocket of space time that can not be monitored. This one is in the town of Salvation in 1871 and change, and you just know that the team aren't going to be happy to kick back on the ship. Ray has cowboy fantasies to live out, and even Roary feels it would be wrong to leave the Old West without a saloon brawl.

"Did you think you were the first time travelers I'd met?"
"Uh... yes."

Sure enough, it takes about five seconds for them to get into it with the local gang, and before you can say knife they've tipped the town from 'crushed by the demands of grasping criminals' to 'on the extinction list'. They are pulled out of trouble at first by Jonah Hex, a man with a scarred face, a long history with time travelers and a contractual right to appear in any DC western. He knows Rip and suggests that they do what Rip does best and leave, but Ray is determined that as they started the fight, they have to stay and protect the town.

In nearby subplot city, Kendra goes looking for a woman she recognises from a past life, only to realise that the woman is her in a past life. This leads to a powerful confrontation, as her older (younger?) self warns Kendra that life without Khufu - for her, Hannibal Hawks, although in a major foul the western Chay-ara herself isn't given a name - is mere existence, and any other love is doomed. It also gives a chance for Sara and Kendra to bond more, and for Kendra to step up and choose to make a go of it with Ray, destiny be damned.

Rather less successfully, Martin swipes medicine from the ship to save a tubercular British kid who turns out to be HG Wells, because of course he does.

'Blend in.'

Rip confesses that he once got time drifted in the Old West, in love with its romance and heroism, but eventually had to leave or he would have prevented a temporally necessary massacre. Ray runs off wave one of bandits, but they can't stay forever and so they agree to a draw-off. Rip stands for Ray and gets to be proper badass for once. Then the Hunters show up and are thoroughly underwhelming, getting taken out in about a minute.

Now shit has got real, it seems, and the Time Masters will send the Pilgrim after them; a lethal assassin who will target their younger selves and take them out of time entirely.

As with many of the better episodes of the series, 'The Magnificent Eight' is at its strongest when it embraces the genre it is visiting, and definitely benefits from getting out of the Savage arc for a while. It's actually a shame that the Hunters showed up, especially when they were so much lamer than advertised. We close on the Pilgrim aiming a gun at the back of teenage Roary's head, and such is the inverse accuracy of Time Master reputations so far that I frankly expect her to miss.

Where the episode falls down is in failing to follow through on the social history strengths of 'Night of the Hawk'. Half a decade out of the Civil War, would people have been so blase about the sudden appearance of armed blacks? I ask this question in all sincerity; I have no real idea, but I doubt it would have been a complete non-event. More definitely, the episode itself gets a little lost in the romance of the period, and Ray in particular seems suddenly very okay about shooting people with guns just because cowboys. It would have been good for the brutality of the time to affect him as the prejudices of the 50s rattled Stein's unthinking love of the period.