Previously on Legends of Tomorrow, Zari and Nate decided to hatch a dragon egg together, Neron took over Ray’s body and released Tabitha the Fairy Godmother from hell, Gary was wooed to the dark side via evil nipple, and Constantine dove into hell to save Ray’s soul.
In DC 2019, we’re reminded that Zari is actually existing two-fold when she’s here in our present. Little Zari is sneaking sweets (classic) and her and her pregnant mother watch Neron use Ray’s body to declare an event called PalmerX, inviting everyone to come see what he’s invented to save them all from the very-real magical creatures threatening the land.
Charlie is upset, because the creature he used as an example in his commercial is an ogre she says is all but harmless. She has no way of knowing this, but on another Earth at this very same time, a man named Lockwood is trying to launch a very similar campaign but against aliens instead of magical creatures.
Regardless, Sara is not deterred by this public announcement. She’s ready to retake the Bureau.
So the team is going to split up. Mick and Nate are going to take on the Fairy Godmother, Sara and Ava will face-off with Neron. The team is a little distracted when the dragon egg starts to shudder with the rumblings of an almost-ready baby dragon, but Sara gets her team to focus up.
Nora calls in, and says she’s done lurking around air ducts, spying on the enemy. She is ready to save Mona. Before she hangs up, she lets the team know that Gary has taken over Ava’s office.
And taken over he has. He’s been taking full advantage of having the Fairy Godmother at his beck and call, getting a massage, having three nipples instead of one. Tabitha tries really hard to get Gary to wish the Legends out of existence, but sweet Gary just worries after Constantine at the mention of his name.
When Nora finds Mona, she’s being tortured by Neron, so she rallies the troops. And listen, I’m not usually one to hit you with four screenshots in a row but…
But before they can storm the Bureau, they bippity boppity boof into thin air because Gary took Tabitha’s advice about making a wish about the Legends, but because he’s Gary, instead of wishing them away, he wished them closer to him. He wants to be part of Book Club.
They try to talk some sense into Gary, try to find out what’s going on while playing along, but when they launch into an attack, the Fairy Godmother freezes them and says that this isn’t going to get him what he wants.
Knowing she’s right, but still unwilling to hurt these people he admires so much, he decides to take another route: making himself captain.
Nora is surprised to find that when she boofed Avalance and Gary away, the Fairy Godmother kept her at the Bureau, but Tabitha doesn’t see Nora as a Legend, since Nora wasn’t there when she got sent to hell. So she tells Nora a bit about how she fell in love with Neron, and sends her off to PalmerX to be Neron’s date while she chases Gary around the multi-verse. Neron finds this whole thing quite hilarious, but Nora is not having a good time.
Nate, Zari, Charlie and Mick infiltrate the conference, and hear Neron talk about a new app called Eyes. It’s an app meant to crowdsource the hunt for magical creatures, but I dunno, I watched the short-lived Wisdom of the Crowd, and I saw all the ways this could go wrong. But before we even get to the issue of wannabe vigilantes and the human error in fearmonger-induced self-reporting, there’s the little hurdle of getting the crowd to even believe there are magical creatures to report. So Neron drags out Mona to trigger Wolfy and let her attack his men before taking him down with one of his Atom-blaster gloves.
Meanwhile, in hell (have I mentioned lately I love the sentences I get to write about this show), Constantine is running from demons he’s pissed off in the past while trying to get an audience with the Triumvirate. And I guess you know I’m a queer millennial* by how offended I was that all the women Constantine encountered seemed to be intended to be perceived as sex workers.
*I like to consider myself Gen Y because that’s what they told me when I was growing up but I guess in the end it’s six of one, half dozen of the other.
ANYWAY Gary has Ava and Sara on the bridge and is trying to decide what his first mission as Captain of the Waverider will be, and when he decides he wants to stop a fairy from messing with Heather Hogan’s Great British Bake Off. Sara and Ava put their acting skills to the test because they’ve now seen enough scary movies together to know it’s best to play along when you’re being held hostage.
For reasons I can only imagine are loosely based in sexism, Gary decides Sara and Ava aren’t enough company and he wants the boys with him, too. This leaves Charlie and Zari to fight Neron on their own.
Which Zari does, happily, using her oft-forgotten wind power to knock some people around. But Neron uses this to his advantage, starting a witch chant, and using it as fuel to propel is plan for people to download his app.
But only 2,000 people have downloaded the app so far. Nora is confused as to why suddenly a tech startup is part of Neron’s evil plan.
But before she can figure it out, Neron orders Tabitha to take her to a cell. Still saying she wants to look out for a fellow witch, instead of taking her to her own cell, Tabitha takes Nora to Mona’s cell, where Mona is bleeding and hurt and, frankly, not looking so hot.
When Zari and Charlie escape from Neron’s tech conference of doom, Zari takes them to her childhood home to hide out. She sneaks another bite of the dessert she got in trouble for when she was small, and tells Charlie about how things were good until ARGUS forced them to move when the attack on Metahumans went down. Zari uses this break to finish reading the Terms & Conditions of Neron’s app, and sure enough, like every Terms & Conditions page we never read, it signs away your soul if you accept and download the app.
On their way back from the mission where Gary stops the Fairy from, I dunno, making the soggy bottoms less soggy? More soggy? I’ve never seen GBBO (sorry Heather please don’t fire me) [Editor’s note: LESS SOGGY!!!!] but whatever it was doing, it’s done now. Ava and Sara are not having any fun at all under this new regime though, so they call Charlie and Zari.
They’ve deduced that Neron’s next plan of action is probably to attack the city with magical creatures to scare people into downloading his app, so Zari and Charlie know that their next move has to be to free all the creatures from the Time Bureau cells.
On the Waverider, Nate tries to convince Gary that they’re all friends, and even though he gets to roll with advantage because of help from his friends…
He rolls a natural one and Gary turns on them all. But again, without his hell-soaked nipple, Gary can’t really swim very deep into the depths of “evil” so he wishes Mick into a baby, Nate into the most awkward phase of puberty, and Sara and Ava into a neverending tap dance.
A very short but important thread #LegendsOfTomorrow pic.twitter.com/NuMxzjiAYg
— Worst Year, Gayer Nic (@CloneNic) May 14, 2019
Back at Zari’s house, Charlie is scared of going back to hell, but Zari convinces her that she’ll never forgive herself if she doesn’t try to help now.
They hear people coming home, so Charlie and Grown-Up Zari run off, accidentally leaving behind the cat-backpack for Little Zari to find. And I won’t lie to you, so much else was happening, that at this point, I thought it was just a cool futuristic backpack and I hadn’t figured out why the heck Zari was carrying it around all of a sudden.
In hell, Constantine tries to make a deal with the Triumvirate, saying he’ll help them stop Neron in exchange for Ray Palmer’s soul. And they do like to make deals, being devils, but they also enjoy torture, so while they agree to give Constantine a soul in exchange for his service, they’re going to make him choose between Ray and the little girl he once failed to save: Astra.
And frankly I think that’s what Ray would have wanted.
Back at the Time Bureau, Nora is trying to keep Mona awake, but Mona is fading fast. She IS pretty happy to see her book club buddy smiling down at her, though.
Desperate, Nora calls on the Fairy Godmother for help.
Before she disappears to help Nora, Tabitha helps Gary undo the things he’s done to the Legends. After she’s gone and the chaos is over (for now, at least), Ava apologizes for always taking advantage of him. Sara feels bad that he felt excluded from the group, but implores him to remember that they’re not the “cool kids” he makes them out to be. They’re outcasts too, just like him, they just happened to find each other and formed this family of misfits. And torturing them isn’t exactly the way to get them to want to hang out with him. So they encourage Gary to use his voice for good, assuring him that if he did, he could be one of them.
When the Fairy Godmother gets to Mona’s cell, she points out that she can’t grant Nora’s wishes because she’s bound to Gary, and suggests Nora, a powerful witch herself, took on Tabitha’s curse. Desperate to help one of her only friends, Nora takes the wand and the curse from Tabitha, but is dismayed to find she’s been duped; she can’t do whatever she wants and grant Mona’s wishes, because now SHE is bound to Gary.
And I’ve never seen anyone so angry at an outfit they were wearing. It actually reminded me a little bit of that one episode of The L Word when Carmen’s mom made Shane wear a dress. I mean, have you ever seen anyone give such an amazing death glare while wearing such a fabulous tiara?
Meanwhile, Charlie is shape-shifting her way through the halls of the Bureau, dodging kisses from Neron and narrowly escaping with her life.
But when the real Tabitha walks in moments after Charlie-Tabitha walks out, Neron knows he’s been played and is less than pleased. He sounds the alarms, but Charlie isn’t scared. Not anymore. With Zari’s remote help, she sets all the creatures free and leads them on a monster jailbreak.
On the Waverider, Gary calls for his Fairy Godmother, but doesn’t even have time to turn around and notice that it’s not Tabitha anymore, but Nora, before he wishes her to hell to help Constantine rescue Ray, as a show of good faith for his newfound Legend friends.
Charlie takes a detour from her monster mash to save Mona, and when Zari zips through a portal, she shoves Mona and Zari back through it, so only she remains in Neron’s clutches.
Neron is a little grumpy about it until Tabitha points out that now, since they have a shapeshifter, they don’t need all the creatures. They have any monster they want in Charlie.
When Constantine is finally presented with the soul of his little Astra, she’s all grown up and entirely unwilling to go with him. Meaning his deal with the devils fell through, because the girl he thought he lost stopped waiting for him to come save her a long time ago.
Getting ready for their final showdown with Neron, the Legends take stock of the menagerie of magical creatures they have on board. Zari blames herself for Charlie’s capture, but Sara reassures her that it’s not her fault, that they’re a team, and they’ll get her out of this.
They ask Gary to stick around and help them defeat Neron and save Charlie, and while they’re all a little scared, they know that together they’ll get through it. Even if they have to turn into a giant stuffed animal god to do it.
As they’re taking in the sight of their new hodgepodge family, Zari realizes that she left the dragon egg in the cat backpack in her childhood home. Cut to Little Zari watching a baby dragon hatch and potentially fucking up the entire timeline for everyone involved. Dun dun dun.
See you next week for the season finale!
I really urge you to watch GBBO, Valarie Anne. It’s so wholesome and sweet. It magics all your problems away, one delicious bake at a time. Unless of course your bake gets the dreaded soggy bottom and then Paul, the Silver Fox, will give you that steely blue glare of disappointment.
Back to LoT – “Gary was wooed to the dark side via evil nipple”. Only this show can make its viewers write/say stuff like this stone cold sober and have it make sense. Also, Nate’s “It’s like a demented Noah’s Ark” got a good chuckle out me.
Lastly, can I just geek the hell out and say that I am in possession of a time courier? Or at least the watch they’re using as a time courier on the show?? That close-up of Charlie holding it to open a portal to the Waverider confirmed it – it’s a binary watch with three lines on its face that light up when you push one of the buttons. The line on the left is the hours, the small line in the middle is the minutes in 10s and the line on the right is minutes in 01-09. It also tells the date if you push the top button after. You can get it on Amazon for under 20 bucks!
There is so much to love about this show but I think my favorite thing is Zari carrying around her dragon baby in the carrying case she was carried in as a cat like mother like daughter.
Zari took charge in Sara’s absence. I’m telling you, when Caity Lotz decides to leave, they’ll make Zari the next captain of the Waverider.
Why are there so many male nipples on screen this season?
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Here’s hoping Young Zari will come up with a much cooler name for the dragon than Wixtable.
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Meanwhile, in hell… (next episode, I hope)
Sara kicks open the doors to the Triumverate office and pauses, magnificently backlit. The three demons inside look up in confusion, and then fear, when they recognize her.
“Oh, shit. You again.”
Because they can’t show female nipples?
All the John Constantine stuff felt like it was from another show (maybe an unused bit from the NBC show) although I enjoyed the metaphor of demons as stock brokers. I loved that some of the visuals felt straight out of a Vertigo comic. It’s interesting when you contrast the grimdark of Constantine with the usual Legends tone, really reminds you how different Legends is from most supernatural/superhero shows.
Did anyone else find Gary’s story line as disturbing as I did? I get it was supposed to be for fun and laughs, but seeing him take away the free will of Sara and Ava (and then Nate and Mick) was really gross. And forcing them to dance faster and faster (with an almost angry look on his face) was also hard to watch. I just wish the Legends hadn’t forgiven him right away- it seemed super rushed to me.
Totally agree! I hated that he didn’t feel the full force of their anger at his manipulations. Boo.
How could i not have noticed Zari’s eyes in the first screenshot?!
I’m not sure it was sexism that made Gary wish the boys aboard the waverider. The writers have been pretty consistent in portraying him as bisexual, what with his crushes on Ava and Constantine, so I felt like it was another way of showing his desire for both female and male companionship.