My favorite ARROWVERSE show – well, maybe now it’s my second favorite after SUPERMAN & LOIS – has returned for more wacky adventures, meet-ups with historical figures and weird interpersonal romantic relationships!
I don’t know that any of the shows in the Arrowverse have reinvented themselves as much as Legends of Tomorrow has over five-plus seasons. The original iteration of the show – with a team consisting of DC Comics stalwarts Firestorm, The Atom, Hawkman and Hawkgirl, Captain Cold and Heatwave, Rip Hunter (along with Arrowverse creation White Canary Sara Lance) – is almost completely different now, with only tangential connections to the universe from which it spawned.
While the team has gone through quite a bit of turnover, with Mick Rory and Sara Lance being the only original members of the team left, the core concept remains: a bunch of scrappy, lovable losers band together to save the day. They’ve gone up against immortals, powerful warlocks, speedsters, government oversight and powerful demons, all in the service of protecting the timeline, even after the timeline was significantly altered during last season’s CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, which they didn’t take part in because the team was over crossovers. Now, it seems, it’s time for the Legends to go up against aliens scattered through the timeline.
The sixth season picks up the morning after the fifth season finale, which saw the Legends partying in 1970s London after defeating the Fates and Sara Lance getting abducted by a strange blue light without any of her teammates noticing that she was gone. Once girlfriend Ava wakes up in a hung over stupor the next morning, she gathers the team in search of Sara.
This is where I wish former Legends recapper JOE was still doing this, because the final stop in getting the team together is to go back to the club and gather Nate, who’s sitting and chatting with a young DAVID BOWIE. I hope Joe, an avowed BOWIE fan, watched and enjoyed the Legends of Tomorrow take on Ziggy Stardust. Joe would have definitely been able to tell us how this fell into Bowie’s timeline and how it could have affected his discography. Oh well.
Bowie manages to clue the team in on where Sara actually is, because he caught it on video, right after he recorded Sara telling him that she was going to propose to Ava before she was abducted. Ava sets plans into motion to try and get her back, which basically just let the other Legends do their thing with the hopes that something works. It does not, since extraterrestrials are really pretty far outside the time travelers’ skills set.
We are not completely without Sara, though, as she awakens in a pod on a spaceship and manages to escape the pod. She then frees Spartacus, who goes to free the other prisoners. But the first pod Spartacus opens is a nasty, snarling alien, forcing Sara to battle it back into the pod. After chastening Spartacus a bit, they find the spaceship’s owners and Spartacus again runs in to battle, only to be eaten whole by one of the two aliens on the bridge.
As if things weren’t already weird enough in this episode – and Legends is at its best when it’s weird – Sara discovers one of the aliens is former Time Bureau lackey, apprentice to John Constantine and Legends mascot Gary Green! He’s been an alien all along, on a mission to Earth to find the quintessential human, which he deemed to be Sara (Spartacus was just a meal for the other alien).
Really, not a single person should be surprised there.
After Sara and Alien Gary knock the other alien (which turns out to be Gary’s fiancee Kayla) out of the ship to try and hit a wormhole to get back to Earth, the other pods holding aliens (along with Kayla) get sucked into the timestream, setting up the season’s story arc as the Legends try and get Sara back. This is going to be so much fun.
Next week, meat!