Legends of Tomorrow: Star City 2046 review

This Legends of Tomorrow review contains spoilers.

Legends of Tomorrow Episode 6

It was probably the most anticipated episode of the entire season, and it might be my least favorite episode since the premiere. This week, we went 30 years into Star City’s future and all we got was this damn fanservice.

It wasn’t a bad episode, it just…it was all entirely unnecessary. The Waverider got hit by Chronos in the timestream at the end of last episode: they fell out and crash landed in Star City in 2046, 30 years in the future of where “we” are in Arrow and Flash. So the team runs around looking for a macguffin while we don’t really learn anything about anyone, and the plot of the season isn’t advanced in any significant manner, and even the relationships are just fluff (with one big exception).

You can even tell that the issue was kind of pointless by the directing: they spend a LOT of time lingering in shots and in scenes that do nothing. There’s a scene where Sara, Rip, and future not-Green Arrow are searching a warehouse for the episode’s macguffin. The three of them wander around the warehouse for about 3 minutes longer than they needed to – they just show them wandering around a darkish room for what feels like forever.

There are three plots in this episode, and I’ll list them here in order of importance:

Jax, Kendra, Ray, and Stein are all left on the ship to make repairs. Jax has a thing for Kendra, and he gets Charlie Bravoed by the Professor for about half the episode, before Kendra decides that being an immortal hawk goddess from ancient Egypt and being on a time travelling spaceship 30 years in her future AND having watched her immortal beloved get whacked by Vandal Savage are all making her fairly undateable right now. That…is it.

In the main plot, Sara and Rip (along with Snart and Rory) travel out into 2046 to find the magical whatever that they need to fix Gideon. They find future Star City to be somewhere between No Man’s Land Gotham and Mad Max Australia.

Sara, not understanding the concept of time travel, wants to help. Rip, not understanding the concept of time travel, explains it in a way that is so stupid that even I have to break our “let’s not talk about how bad the time travel is” rule. He says “changing the future is arguably more dangerous than changing the past,” and I wish the writers would just replace all the time travel talk with the characters shouting “OK WE’RE JUST GONNA DO HYPERTIME NOW” in a monotone, because it’s getting really hard to ignore.

AAAAnyway, if this part of the episode was made of anime, it’d be entirely Asuka Langley panty shots (that’s a fanservice joke I’m so sorry). It’s all about getting the audience to ooh and aah at comic references. Sara and Rip find a young Green Arrow they don’t recognize, fighting off a city of Deathstroke’s goons. Young GA helps them find where the macguffin might be – it’s in the old Arrowcave, which is where they find a robot arm and an old, bearded, one-armed Oliver Queen and not-Green Arrow reveals himself to be John Diggle, Jr. And young Dig refuses the name, and insists everyone call him Connor Hawke. Then they search a warehouse forever, Young Dig gets captured by Deathstroke (who’s actually Slade’s son, Grant), and Ollie takes up Green Arrowing again to go save him.

And in the second (and most important) plot, Heat Wave starts to chafe from Captain Cold forcing him to be a hero. This is the only one that has meaningful, interesting character development: Rory takes control of an undergang by being delightful and violent, and has designs on taking out Grant Wilson and taking control of 2046. Snart wants them to keep going after Savage, and knocks Rory out and takes him back to the Waverider to force it to happen.

They don’t spend a lot of time with this (likely because it’s going to be the main conflict of next week’s episode, if the preview was any guide), but it’s the one that feels the fullest out of all the storylines this week, probably in large part because of how awesome Wentworth Miller and Dominic Purcell continue to be.

That’s about it. If it feels light, it’s because it was, and that’s why I could take or leave it.

DC UNIVERSE TIME BUBBLE

– The team jumps into a school bus to avoid Connor fighting off a horde of Ravager’s goons early in the episode, and Sara definitely says “shit” when she leaves the bus to help him.

– “Nobody’s Having More Fun Than Captain Cold & Heat Wave” Update: I spent most of Heat Wave and Cold’s scenes early in the show laughing. Seriously, they are wonderful. Mick gets a fur and a chalice, and that’s all he could ever want from life.

– Ravager is a title that’s been held by several people in the DC Comics Universe: the first was Grant Wilson, Slade’s son. He had similar abilities to his father, and died a few times. The best to hold the title was Slade’s daughter, Rose Wilson. His other brother, Jericho, is a mute former Teen Titans member with a blonde jheri curl who has the same powers as Captain Ginyu – he can possess people he makes eye contact with. Lot of anime jokes tonight, I apologize.

– Old, bearded, one-armed Oliver is from Dark Knight Returns, the “last Batman” story by Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, and Lynn Varley, where iconic images like Batman in power armor fighting Superman, and a jagged bat flying through a shattered window came from. It’s celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, and FYI, DC is releasing an anniversary edition that’s pretty amazing. It’s got a bunch of line art and pitch documents in as extras, and it just looks really nice.

– “…a warehouse on Adams and O’Neill” Denny O’Neill and Neal Adams did the Green Arrow/Green Lantern road trip comic that had Speedy get hooked on the smack.

– Connor Hawke is not John Diggle Jr. in the comics. In the comics, he’s the child of Oliver Queen and Sandra Hawke. He’s raised basically as a monk, and for at least one issue of Grant Morrison’s JLA, he is a total badass when he takes down The Key alone.

– Hypertime wasn’t in the episode, but I mentioned it, so I feel obligated to try and explain it, even though the people who created it can’t. Hypertime was the cosmological concept that tried to deal with broken continuity by saying “it all happened.” Some changes resulted in completely divergent timelines that continued on their own (like how Marvel’s multiverse worked – when Rachel Summers prevented the Days of Future Past timeline from coming to pass, all that did was split her timeline off to become its own divergent alternate reality).

Others would diverge for a bit, then eventually flow back into the main timeline. Like the Legion of Super Heroes. All of it.

– Next week: Mick stays pissed at Snart, and they fight over who gets to be the boss of their time travelling crime duo. In spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace.