Legends of Tomorrow Season 4 Episode 8 Review: Legends of To-Meow-Meow

This Legends of Tomorrow review contains spoilers.

Legends of Tomorrow Season 4 Episode 8

It sucks that Legends of Tomorrow had their first real miss as their midseason finale. However, it says something about Legendsthat their worst episode of the season is still sooooooo entertaining. 

“Legends of To-Meow-Meow” picks up where “Hell No, Dolly” left off – after Constantine changed time to protect Dez from the most dangerous force in the DC television multiverse (John’s own self interest). The new shapeshifter, Charlie, has her powers back, but also Zari is a cat.

We spend the rest of the episode in escalatingly ridiculous situations with Constantine and Charlie trying to change anything they could to keep Dez alive and Charlie’s powers working. First, Nate, Ray, Mick and Garima are the “Custodians of the Chronology,” an A-Team knockoff executing magical anomalies as they find them. The change that John and Charlie made keeps John from joining the team, and led to Sara getting gored by the unicorn in episode 1 and sent the boys over the deep end. It also turned Ava into an Indigo Girls-listening goth (which makes no sense – the Indigo Girls are extremely not goth). So Goth Ava teams up with Mona, Charlie, John and Cat Zari to set things right.

The jumpship goes back to Woodstock and zaps the unicorn before it can gore anyone, but that just leads to the fairy godmother in Salem killing all the guys, and Ava, Sara and an upgraded Gideon going all Charlie’s Angels on the timestream as the Sirens of Space-Time.

Here’s the thing. Last week, we talked about how the writers know their characters inside out, and the week before that it was about how they put character to work advancing the plot rather than making them change to fit the plot. That…didn’t really happen here. Instead, we got a bunch of gimmicks thrown at the screen in the hopes that volume would overcome character gaps. As great as almost every single gimmick was, though, they failed to include anything that had a similar emotional impact to what came last week with our flash of sympathy for John.

further reading – Elseworlds: Complete Guide to DC Comics Easter Eggs on the Arrowverse Crossover

Here, every time someone on the team dies, everyone else turns into a sociopath. Ray and Nate are arguing over who gets more kills, and Ava and Sara are straight up bullies. So as amazing as puppet Legends are, or as sweet and adorable as Cat Zari is, or as Looney Tunesian the continuous memorials in the Time Bureau are, it doesn’t work because of how dense John and Charlie are and how over the top everyone’s response to death is. This is a crew of serial mopers. Ray and Nate don’t turn into cold blooded killers when Sara dies, they cry and drink together.

Constantine eventually catches the hint and crafts an elaborate plan to go back to New Orleans, create a third walking Constantine int he same time period, and keep his relationship with Dez alive so he can stop Dez from being alive as (presumably) a part of a deal with Neron. It works and resets the timeline to what it’s supposed to be, and now we have no more Legends of Tomorrowuntil April. Presumably there we’ll find out more about why Dez is now probably Neron and he’s golfing with Hank Haywood.

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