Legends of Tomorrow - 'Abominations'

"Our plan worked poifectly."

The Legends are catapulted into danger once more, when they intercept a distress signal from a time pirate(1) who has crashed after stealing an experimental bioweapon. Thy track the signal to the American Civil War. Ray gets his licks straight out of the gate as Sara benches him and then cuts off his comms. The rest of the team find and torch the crash time pod, but the weapon is already loose, transforming confederates into barely stoppable zombies, which manage to kill a vital Union spy whose resultant failure to bring Confederate battle plans to General Ulysses S. Grant(2) costs the Union the war, creating the risk of a temporal aberration and divergent timeline. For want of a nail and all.

Despite the risks, Jax and Amaya go undercover in the spy's place to infiltrate a cotillion and steal the plans. Jax is initially resistant to risking the mission to rescue individual slaves - while Amaya is oddly weak on the whole 'stick to the plan' angle for a member of a wartime paramilitary/espionage unit like the JSA - but soon discovers that the lot of a slave in a southern plantation under threat from abolitionists is worse than his own experience of 21st, 20th and even 18th century racism could have prepared him for. Stein - largely immobilised by his fear of zombies - is nonetheless momentarily overwhelmed by the depth of Jackson's feelings of despair.

But when things look too heavy, there are always zombies.

Meanwhile, Sara and Nate try to persuade Grant that there is a zombie menace(3), which Sara does by fetching some zombies, as the proof of the pudding is in the shambling. The camp is almost overrun, but Nate acts as bait to lure the zombies into an explosive trap, Steeling himself to survive the blast. Back on the Waverider, Stein must face his fears to provide an infected Mick with an antiserum whipped up by Ray before he eats them both.

On the plantation, Amaya rescues Jax and the break out all of the slaves as zombies attack. As he goes in to get the plans, he offers an alliance with the landowner in common cause, but the man rejects the idea of arming his slaves, moments before being eaten by zombies. Luckily none of those present at the cotillion was a pivotal historical figure, and Grant receives the plans in the name of the deceased spy. As they head off, Grant counsels Sara on the burdens of command, Stein comforts a shaken Jax, and Rory tells Ray that being the outsider can be great, and gives him a gift from the greatest outsider he ever knew: Leonard Snart's cold gun.

I admit, I did not see Ray's reconstruction going that way, although I was interested to read that he might originally have been intended to be Ted Kord, only Arrow couldn't get the rights. It may be then that they are going to be swinging him towards gadgeteering instead of shrinking.

Overall, this was another decent episode, although the more light-hearted elements of this week's plot sat a little at odds with the weight of the Jax and Amaya segment. The show frequently confronts historical prejudices, but this is one of the worst and it felt odd for them to go hard at it while romanticising the Union quite as much as they did. It felt as if the monster plot could have been better integrated, especially with the potential application of custom bioweapons to race metaphors, and as it was it created an unhelpful distance from the power of the human plot.

(1) He mentions a ship called the Gauntlet, and I would not be surprised if we saw that again.
(2) Fun fact, the S is for Hiram; sort of.
(3) Although as Nate points out, the word zombie is well short of common currency.