Legends of Tomorrow - 'Legendary'

"The question is not where is he, but... when is he."

It's all gone kind of pear-shaped for the Legends, with the loss of one of their own and the escape of Vandal Savage into history.

Rip drops the team off in 2016, but five months after they left. Martin tries to settle into a life of quiet retirement, while Rory tries to break in a new Captain Cold, but finds himself unable to stand his partner's reckless attitude; not that this makes him any more sanguine about Ray's suggestion that they team up. This section of the show belongs to Sara, however, who of course has to learn that in her absence, her sister has been killed by Damien Darhk. Thus, when Martin and Ray manage to draw Rip back to 2016, she puts a knife to Rip's throat and demands he take her back to January.

Sara gets knocked out for a bit to defer the confrontation while the team find a note from Kendra. In one of her few really effective moments in the entire season, Kendra breaks loose from Savage in 1944, long enough to find a GI whose helmet she recognises from the Waverider's office (lucky break) and hide a note inside, summoning the rest of the team to rescue the Hawks. Then Rip visits Sara and explains that she would at best be setting herself up for the same pain he suffered as he tried over and over again to save his family, only to see them die each time*.

They bust out the Hawks, with a bonus shootout with Nazis as Savage steals a meteorite from them, but Kendra is stunned and recaptured, because of course she is. Based on what Savage gloated to Kendra and Scythian, Martin realises that Savage plans to three meteorites containing the Thanagarian technology which gave him and the Hawks their powers, combined with the blood of the Hawks, to create three temporal explosions at three points in history and so undo all history since the original impact in 1700BC.

The team split into three teams. Firestorm and Sara will tackle Savage at the weapons fair in the seventies, Mick and Ray will handle fifties Savage, while Ray and Scythian rescue Kendra and take down Savage in 2021. If they all do this at the moment he activates the meteorites, the radiation will make him mortal and he will die.

I just need to channel Harry Wells to say now that this plan is asinine. It makes no fucking sense.

Okay, with that out of the way, the action denouement is actually pretty cool. In the fifties, Mick kills Savage to avenge Snart and Ray shrinks the meteorite, because apparently when it comes to pan-chronic explosions, size does matter. In the seventies, Sara defeats Savage in hand to hand combat and Firestorm flexes a new talent, transmuting the meteorite into water. Finally, in 2021, Rip hits Savage until he explodes and then flies the meteorite into the sun.

For those keeping score yes, neither Hawkman nor Hawkgirl strikes a killing blow on Savage.

Rip hallucinates a reunion with his family in death, and in doing so accepts that they are gone, but that he is not ready to die, dropping off the meteorite and time jumping back to Earth.

Huh.

Rory visits pre-time travel Snart to say a rough and awkward goodbye - Snart's level of coldness really brings home how much Snart had changed over the course of the series - and Rip offers the team a chance to join him patrolling time in the absence of the Time Masters. All accept save the Hawks, whom I guess realised that they were fundamentally pointless throughout this exercise. Thus Legend of Tomorrow closes its season, with the six wot actually do stuff heading off into the timestream to...

Wait! Actually a future version of the Waverider crashes next to them and a man named Rex Tyler, of the Justice Society of America, relays a warning from Mick that if they board the Waverider, they will all die.

Season 1 of Legends of Tomorrow has suffered hard from the central Savage vs. Hawks plot. It was always going to be a risk that they had effectively wrapped that one up in the Flash/Arrow crossovers, and the series also failed to make Savage quite big enough to measure up as an unstoppable antagonist. Personally, I thought from the start that conflating him with Hath-Set was a mistake, not least because it tied him to the Hawks and then they killed Carter and refused to let Kendra do anything. And then it turned out that the Time Masters were the real villains all along.

It might have been better to have Hath-Set as the villain of the crossover, then introduce Vandal Savage for the series as someone who crossed paths with the Hawks in numerous lives, hence their recruitment. Also, to have had Hawkgirl do something useful at some point, instead of failing a lot and serially dropping the weapons which could kill Savage.

Hey ho. Season 2 ahoy, and if the quality of the latter half of the series, the addition of the JSA, and the absence of the Hawk burden is anything to go by, this could be a lot of fun. Although at this point another female lead might be nice.

* Now, my impression was that this was because the Time Masters were being jerkwads, so I actually don't know why this is all still un-undoable, except for the message being about moving on.