Legends of Tomorrow - 'Out of Time'

Sara Lance continues to impress with her ability to home in unerringly on
history's repressed lesbians.

So, while Felicity is counselling Barry, it turns out Oliver is having his own time travel-adjacent adventure. Dr Nate Heywood, self-styled 'time detective' has detected ripples in history which he has connected to the actions of the equally self-styled Legends of Tomorrow, including the crash of a timeship off New York, coinciding with an atomic blast in 1942; a year that they were warned by Rex Tyler to avoid. Olly and Nate take a sub down to the wreck of the Waverider, where they find Mick Roary in stasis and revive him to hear his story.

Roary begins by describing a successful mission, in which they thwarted an attempt by ray-gun toting Red Guards to prevent the conception of Louis XIV, in spite of Sara sleeping with the Queen of France. Apparently bizarre forces inexorably draw our White Canary into contact with the frustrated lesbians of history, because damn she gets a lot of action this episode(1). Anyway, despite blowing up a fair bit of Versailles and Rip giving the team an earful for going loud, the mission is a technical success, but points to a temporal nemesis shipping ray guns through history.

Stealth!

Then they detect a Timequake, a massive disruption caused, it turns out, by the nuclear annihilation of New York in 1942. The team race to secure Albert Einstein from a physics symposium, where a group of German agents attempt to kidnap him. Einstein resists rescue, and Stein punches him in the face, while Rip relieves one agent of his silenced pistol, shoots the others and swishes out while drinking a martini.

Seriously, Legends season 1, this right here is what you were missing. Heists, shenanigans, buckled swashes and punching eminent physicists in the face. Could it get any better?

Well, yes, because it turns out that Damien Darhk is behind the scheme, triggering Sara's preemptive vengeance mode, and because the bombing is still on - thanks to the abduction of Einstein's unprotected secret collaborator and ex-wife Mileva Maric, which means angry showdowns and punching of Nazis. Fuck. Yeah.

Unfortunately, Ray's suit isn't as radiation proof as he thought and his attempt to defuse the bomb fails, although they do rescue Maric. Sara is beaten down by Darhk, and when he launches the warhead on a torpedo towards New York, Rip pilots the Waverider into its path, putting the injured Roary in stasis and scattering the others through time.

His story finished, Roary teams up with Heywood to track the others, rescuing Ray from a T-Rex, Stein and Jax (whom Rip had working on the Waverider's systems throughout the episode to prepare him to take care of the ship if anything happened to Rip) from a mediaeval child king, and Sara from being burned as a lesbian witch in Salem(2). Thus assembled, Gideon plays Rip's 'last message', but the absence of his body from the Waverider suggests that he may not have managed to go down with the ship as much as he anticipated.

To wrap up, the team make sure Maric gets protection by having Einstein name her as his co-worker, then are ambushed by the Justice Society of America, looking sweet AF and demanding some 'splainin', and Darhk is rescued from disgruntled Nazis by his, if you will(3), partner in time: Eobard Thawne, the Reverse-Flash.

So, where to start... I hope they bring back Rip at some point, although not having too many characters would avoid some of last season's problems. The absence of Vandal Savage, guaranteed mission failure, and the load that was Hawkgirl the Underused, Season 2 kicks off in spectacular style with the kind of time-twisting team missions that it always felt the series needed. It is, quite frankly, glorious, and I hope they can hold onto this level of energy as well as keeping all of the characters served.

(1) I hope that they remember she's supposed to be bi, less to see Caity Lodz kissing guys and more because bi doesn't get enough play in the media.
(2) Although in fact most of them seem to be on top of their situations, just holding back rather than tearing a bloody swath through history.
(3) Or even if you won't.