Reviews

Legends of Tomorrow Season 5 Episode 3 Review: Miss Me, Kiss Me, Love Me

Legends of Tomorrow follows its best episode ever with a good table setter for the rest of the season.

By Jim Dandeneau | February 5, 2020 | | 0

This Legends of Tomorrow review contains spoilers.

Legends of Tomorrow Season 5 Episode 3

Under normal circumstances, “Miss Me, Kiss Me, Love Me” would be everything I want out of an episode of Legends of Tomorrow. It moves the characters around and gives them new partners to play off of, has a clever story that’s equal parts genre commentary and season long meta-narrative, revels in its own continuity without wallowing in it, and has the cast generally having a great time. In fact, the only thing I can find wrong with it is that it immediately follows “Meet the Legends,” the best episode in the show’s entire run, so it suffers a tiny bit by comparison. Unfair? Sure, but that’s what you get for putting out my favorite hour of television in a decade.

Legends takes the season milieu and runs with it in ”Miss Me, Kiss Me, Love Me,” bringing Bugsy Siegel back to 1947 Hollywood. He comes back mad and full of blackmail, and Sara, Constantine and Ray are mistaken as part of a private eye team Bugsy’s girlfriend hired to get her out from under the brutal mobster.

Meanwhile, Nate and Behrad head back to B’s family. Nate is still reeling from the flash of old timeline Zari at the end of the last episode, so running into her sets him off a little bit. Even moreso when he discovers she’s the 2044 version of an Instagram influencer.

Mick and Ava are backup, and that, combined with Ava’s new commitment to Sara and lack of any structure or responsibility in her life (now that she’s not responsible for an entire Time Bureau), has set her adrift. So they end up getting *hammered*.

The episode does a great job of weaving the three plot threads together. Nate and Zari piecing together what happened does feel like a B-plot, but it’s so obviously important to the structure of the season that it’s less of a secondary matter than it is a branch of the same story. Ava’s angst and the main plot of the episode dovetail with each other really well – there have been episodes in the past that have not folded everything together so deftly. Ava’s payoff, getting blitzed and then singing Bel Biv Devoe’s “Poison” without a band, poorly, to a 1947 swing club while hallucinating a full big band backup, was simultaneously ridiculous, endearing and effective.

Legends wants us to think this week is a Constantine episode. He’s the main focus of the character development. He starts the episode in hell, telling Astra (hell’s new ruler after the events of last season’s finale) that he’s onto her plan and that he eats his steak well done like a MONSTER. The whole thing is about his guilt for continually failing his friends, and it ends with him back in hell, dropping Bugsy off and telling Astra he’s going to save her. It’s great, and Matt Ryan is so EXTREMELY Constantine that there isn’t a wasted second when the camera is on him.

But this week is a Brandon Routh episode. He gets all the best lines and is going out of his way to prove that he’s the heart and soul of the show in his last season. Honestly, after putting him back in the Superman costume for 15 minutes, it’s hard not to see his oafish, delightful charm and get a little wistful for the hours and hours of Clark Kent we never got from him. He’s an absolute joy here, whether it’s his “Thank you!” to Bugsy’s girlfriend after she accuses him of having a cop face to his “I know you’re a hero” line to Constantine at the end. The only thing he does wrong is sweep – he uses a broom like Melissa Benoist throws, but if I was Superman in a movie once, I probably wouldn’t sweep for several years either.

The rest of the cast is amazing – Tala Ashe is back, but superficially EXTREMELY different from who she was in earlier seasons. Her influencer persona was a huge reveal for me, but the best part of her work this week was how effectively and subtly she showed that there’s a lot more going on with her. Caity Lotz continues to walk around like she owns the joint, as she does – she’s having a blast and kind of casually intimidating at the same time, which is a fun combo. Add to this the fact that the last ten minutes are basically just Godfather references (Jeannie’s car blowing up is verrrrrrrrrrry Appalonia in Sicily, and the way Constantine drops the hellfire gun after shooting Bugsy in hell reminded me a lot of the way Michael walked out of the restaurant after killing Sollazzo), and you’ve got an episode that I’m guaranteed to love.