Legends of Tomorrow - 'Raiders of the Lost Art'

That beard. That hair. That accent.

Back from the Christmas break, we dare to ask the question: What the hell is going on with Rip Hunter's accent.

Yes, as we saw at the end of the last episode, the last of the Time Masters is apparently living in the mid-70s making crappy scifi movies about himself and talking in what I assume to be Arthur Darvill's best American accent. As we discover in a flashback, he did this by switching off Gideon and shoving his hand into the temporal core of the ship, which I suspect involved bypassing more than a few 'no user serviceable parts' warnings and invalidating whatever warranty remains on the product of an ontologically invalidated technological progression. He also took a stick with him; not usually a big deal, except that the Legion of Doom - so dubbed by Nate - are searching for the Spear of Destiny(1), which historically would include certain stick-like elements.

The Legends track Rip to his studio, where he and his buddy George are working on their film school theses. Unfortunately the Legion beat them to the punch and demand the spear, resulting in George running off and Rip being shot. While the amnesiac Hunter recovers in the Waverrider, Ray and Nate struggle to do their usual jobs thanks to a massive aberration in the timeline: Rip's buddy George is George Lucas, and if he is scared away from film making, Ray won't be inspired by Star Wars to become an inventor, not Nate by Indiana Jones to be an archaeologist.

"Yeah; rayguns, bitches!"

It gets worse, as George was the prop master for Rip's film and so he is in possession of the stick, which is indeed part of the Spear of Destiny. The stick is in the trash, so Nate and Ray have to accompany George Lucas to try to rescue something precious from a load of his rubbish, and I don't mean reviving the franchise after the prequels. They end up in a garbage masher, because of course they do, and have to persuade Lucas to believe in himself as a film maker in order to reboot the timeline and access Nate's powers and Ray's suit. Of course, this means that they are probably responsible for the level of self-confidence that led to the prequels, as well as predestination paradoxing the garbage masher sequence or something.

The Legends are able to subdue Dahrk and Merlyn, but get trashed (see what I did there?) by Thawne, who puts in a late appearance. Oddly, the speedster is deeply thrown by the appearance of Rip Hunter, but alas he's still in his 70s American mode, just fronting as the old Rip to try to help out, and he gets kidnapped and handed over to the League of Assassins' finest torture alumni. Still, it is notable that the Reverse Flash is scared of Rip; perhaps he doesn't know that the Time Masters are defunct.

The main plot of course throws up the possibility of the Legion doing what the Time Masters tried to do and gunning for the younger Legends, although apparently being time travelers provides some insulation and Rip is still going despite the extemporal orphanage where he was raised by Celia Imrie apparently no longer existing. Man, time travel is confusing. Anyway, it's a decent episode and a nice nod to the series' adventure roots.

(1) A fact that Nate works out once Amaya suggests that the two amulets were part of a larger whole.