Legends of Tomorrow Season 5 Finale Explained

This article contains Legends of Tomorrow spoilers.

Legends of Tomorrow has wrapped, completing it’s most successful season to date and leaving “The Thong Song” stuck in thousands of heads. And it’s left us with plenty to think about while we wait for season 6.

WHAT HAPPENED TO SARA?

Sara Lance was celebrating with the rest of the team. She defeated Atropos, the stabby Fate whose light blinded Sara and gave her the ability to see people’s deaths if she touched them, by kicking her into the Loom of Fate, destroying it. She fixed her crew and helped save her friend Charlie from the crippling self-doubt and inadequacy pushed on her by her evil fate sister, Lachesis. She got loaded at a Smell show in 1970s London. And then she got abducted by aliens. 

That shouldn’t surprise you too much. Legends is a show that has shown a willingness to go to any thematic length to have a good time. But it opens a tiny, tiny crack in a door to a part of the DC comics universe mostly ignored by the rest of the Arrow family of shows: DC’s cosmic comics. 

We’ve seen the Dominators before in the first crossover, Invasion. Legends co-showrunner Phil Klemmer told TVLine not to expect the Dominators back. “We wanted to shape the season to lean into kind of a B-movie creature feature and low-budget ’80s [productions],” he said. So that rules out some of the biggest guns in DC space – Darkseid, certainly, but Mongul, Brainiac, or some of the Legion of Super-Heroes villains like the Fatal Five as well. But there are two races or beings who fit the B-movie vibe Klemmer suggests almost perfectly: the Kroloteans, and Starro the Conqueror.

The Kroloteans are a race of evil geneticists who are also gremlins. They’re small, yellow and screechy, and first showed up in Green Lantern books back when Hal Jordan was most recently resurrected, but they’re probably best known as the main bad guys behind the second season of Young Justice, the mysterious invaders who were kidnapping children around the world and giving them super powers. Looked at from the right angle, they’re very easy to fit into Legends’ aesthetic – it’s not hard to imagine them as the aliens from Mars Attacks!

Starro the Conqueror is a starfish who controls minds by latching onto people’s necks. He is unquestionably the greatest high-concept in all of comics. He’s also PERFECT for this show: just the right mix of ridiculous and sinister, and he would be an amazing season villain. 

WHAT HAPPENED TO CHARLIE?

The shapeshifting television executive Fate sister Clotho who’s been running with the Legends for the last two seasons departed the team at the end of this episode. She decided to settle down and go back to leading her old ‘70s English punk band, The Smell. 

This is the second character of Maisie Richardson-Sellers’ to leave the show. The first was Nate Heywood’s first on-screen love, Amaya Jinwe, Vixen. It’s a move that the cast and crew have known about for some time, according to Klemmer. “We knew that [Maisie] was wanting to make her mark as a filmmaker on her own, and so that allowed us to craft a story that would, hopefully, make for a satisfying conclusion,” he told TVLine. “The finale was sort of all about her.” 

HOW MANY ZARIS ARE THERE?

Just one now. In the second to last episode of the season, Mona and Gary retconned the Legends to make them remember everything, and when they did, it split Zari into her pre-Heyworld and post-Heyworld selves – cool hacker Zari 1.0 and secretly deep and awesome influencer InstaZari. Each one got to pursue her own romance – 1.0 reuniting with Nate, InstaZari hooking up with Constantine. And each one got a couple of moments to be awesome separate from the other. 

Unfortunately, the two Zaris coexisting started to rip the timestream apart. Behrad started feeling some light “acid reflux,” which turned out to be the bullet he caught from an Argus agent in 1.0’s timeline. The coexistence of both Zaris meant each one’s history was competing to be the extant one. So 1.0 decided to save her brother and head back into the air totem. 

This gave us one of the strongest moments of the finale, as Nate had yet another love interest ripped from him. But this time he remembers her, and their parting was beautifully acted, moving, and meaningful for longtime viewers and new ones alike. It also means that Behrad and InstaZari can keep working on their Wonder Twins bit – early in the episode, they held hands to strengthen the air blast from the totem and launch Atropos into the Loom of Fate. Expect more of this in season 6 as well. 

It was also more smart character work from the Legends team. Klemmer told TVLine that all options were on the table – keep both Zaris, merge them into one character, or what they landed on, putting her back into the totem. Two Zaris was incredibly impractical, even if it would have given season 5 MVP Tala Ashe more time to shine. “Just the complexity [of] having her play two characters almost killed us in the finale,” he said. Ultimately, they settled on putting 1.0 back in the totem because it was the only way to honor the development of both 1.0 and InstaZari. 

For more on Legends of Tomorrow season 6, including more on who the main villains are, more on Heat Wave’s new role as a dad, and more ideas on what songs they can follow up “The Thong Song” with (PONY! DO PONY!), stick with Den of Geek!