Legends of Tomorrow - 'River of Time'

Oh, this is going to end badly.

Well, hoorah!

Yes, the Legends have won the day and it's time to head home for tea and crumpets.

Vandal Savage is captured and Rip's family... are still going to die. But wait, Ray finds evidence that the Leviathan was built using way too futuristic tech, which means Savage has been dickering with time and Rip can finally get his fellow Time Masters involved!

Without pausing for repairs, they zip off to the Vanishing Point, only for the engines to blow, leaving the ship stranded in the timestream. Just about everyone has a one-to-one with Savage in which he lectures them, and Jax gets irradiated while fixing the engine so that his body begins to age rapidly. Some of the crew recall their last meetings before departure - Sara with Nissa, Martin with his wife and Ray with Felicity - and Ray gets understandably upset over his fiancee suddenly obsessing about the reincarnation of her dead lover whom she didn't seem that fond of until he died.

Also, she insists that his real name is Carter Hall, despite the fact that that probably isn't the case. In fact, in the past 150 years there's a good chance he has been at least one, possibly two other people who are no more Carter Hall than Scythian Torvil is.

See.

Martin puts Jax in the jump ship, theorising that a time jump will save him and probably that Firestorm would unbalance the rest of the episode. Savage goads Ray into trying to put a beat down on him, which goes about as well as you might expect. Deactivating Gideon, Savage and Torvil take out most of the team, before Kendra's impending death triggers Torvil's memory and powers and he flips on Savage. Kendra hooks up with Torvil by default and Ray takes it like a man, thanking her for at least showing him that he is capable of finding love again after Anna, even if it didn't work out.

So, what? You were just... messing around with Felicity? Does she seem like the 'messing around' kind of girl to you? Damn, dude; I actually felt sorry for you getting dumped in favour of Oliver, but that is some cold shit right there. I don't care if you were traumatised; I'm glad she dumped your ass. Tool.

Savage is dragged before the Time Masters and immediately released by Druse, who is responsible for helping him to overcome the actions of the Legends. See! I fucking knew the Time Masters would turn out to be the real villains. It's the whole 'murdering people as babies' that tipped me off. Everyone but Leonard Snart, Robber of ATMs and Sara are captured, setting us up for the big finale.

Legends of Tomorrow has been a bit hit and miss, and 'River of Time' encapsulates my problems in a nutshell. Most of the parts of the episode are good, but it fails to come together as a cohesive whole. It's good to see the plot finally moving forwards, but once more we have one character shipped offscreen (and I really hope he makes it  back for the finale) and a rushed focus on a dramatic conflict - Rip's obsession and whether it endangers the crew - that ought to have been dealt with more gradually in the first half of the season. It also fails its own time travel theory and/or continuity, with Rip offering an escape route to 2016 for characters who currently have no timeline to return to.

But the worst of it, again is Hawkgirl and her relationship dramas. Once more, the character who should be the most important in the season, the only person who can really stop Vandal Savage, spends all her time flapping - sorry; pun not intended - over the men in her life, not to mention telling Sythian Torvil that he doesn't know his own name, despite the fact that he might well be called Sythian Torvil in this life, and is actually more likely to be called Scythian than Carter. Having wrecked Savage's shit last week, Kendra also comes up damsel in this fight, and has to be rescued by 'Carter'. Furthermore, Ray's whole bit about the utter blandness of Kendray being his first big post-Anna love is a crashing disservice to every character involved.