Hello and welcome to this Legends of Tomorrow recap of episode 712, “Too Legit To Quit.”

Previously on Legends, our heroes defeated the RoboLegends, but before they were home free, Evil Astra crawled out of the depths of hell and stabbed Gideon in the back, quite literally. We open this week with Gary carrying Gideon to the Waverider, actual Astra hot on his heels, worried about her baby girl.

Luckily, RoboAstra forgot that humans’ “hearts” aren’t at the nape of their necks like the RoboLegends’ were, and they get Human Gideon to the med bay still alive. But realize they don’t have the ability to heal Gideon without, well, Gideon. So the captains rush off to turn Evil Gideon on while Astra talks sweetly to Gideon, who is mumbling numbers.

As soon as Evil Gideon is activated, she immediately shuts off the oxygen on the ship, ready to finish off the Legends once and for all. Astra chokes out the numbers Gideon said, and Evil Gideon asks who’s on the table; when she realizes it’s Human Gideon, she turns the oxygen back on, annoyed. The protocol Gideon and Astra invoked means Gideon can’t self-destruct, and thus, Evil Gideon can’t kill Human Gideon, and therefore can’t kill the Legends.

They realize the only place they’re safe from the oxygen being shut off is the lab, so Gideon escorts them there and goes out to have a chat with the AI, Gideon to Gideon.

Evil Gideon thinks Human Gideon is being silly. “You can’t protect them forever,” she says. But our Gideon isn’t shaken by her threat. She simply responds, “I can try.”

Trapped in the lab and with down time for the first time in a while, the Legends realize they’re actually famished. But they sure don’t trust Evil Gideon to fabricate them some food.

Spooner had squirreled away some nuts so Astra uses some magic to duplicate them until there’s enough for everyone.

After their snack, Human Gideon comes in and says that Evil Gideon promised not to kill them…if they all retire.

Immediately there’s a debate. The Legends don’t think they can trust Evil Gideon to just do their jobs better than they’ve been doing it. Someone says that Legends don’t retire, and then the team starts listing all the Legends that have, in fact, retired, (giving Hawk Girl one last slap in the face by lumping her in with Hawk Guy when Sara remembers the “Hawk People”), but Nate says he meant they don’t retire in bulk.

Plus, they’re not even sure they can trust that Evil Gideon won’t just kill them as soon as they let their guard down. Gary tries to act as the Legends’ liaison, and says that maybe if Evil Gideon would show them what their retired, not-murdered futures could look like, they wouldn’t be as distrustful.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Legends are still plotting a way around this whole situation. Nate has a time courier, but it’s dead, and the only charger is in the armory.

Sara and Ava make a plan and divvy up the team; Spooner will crawl through the ducts, Gwyn and Nate will draw her a map, Behrad will loop the video in the armory…and Fancy Zari feels left out when she doesn’t end up having a job. That is, until Human Gideon and Gary tell them they can see their futures, and the captains decide Zari will be the distraction, a job that bums her out a bit. Spooner, on the other hand, was born for this.

When Zari sees her future, she’s accepting an award for influencer of the decade. But the first thing Zari notices is that the air totem isn’t on her future self’s wrist. Human Gideon tries to reassure her, saying she becomes a cosmetic titan, but while this might have made the Fancy Zari of three years ago beyond thrilled, she’s grown and changed and learned so much and this isn’t what she imagined for herself, not anymore.

When she goes back to tell Ava and Sara about what she saw, and tells them that she feels like it’s regressive. Like retiring would be a step backward, not forward.

Ava isn’t worried though because it’s not like they’re going to take this path anyway.

Behrad goes next and he has the opposite reaction to his sister’s. He sees himself singing on a kids’ show called You, Me, and B, and is obsessed with his future album of children’s songs.

His song plays as the rest of the team gets to see their potential futures. Sara and Ava see a little girl sending a video message back from the summer camp they once gave Ava her shot at a teen kiss. Ava and Sara’s eyes widen as the blonde girl signs off, saying goodbye to her Mom and Mama. Their daughter.

Astra and Nate don’t seem to mind their futures either, as a politician and an author, respectively. (Side note: Astra’s platform slogan is, “To hell with corruption.”) But it’s hard to imagine; all of the Legends feel conflicted. Until today they hadn’t thought much about their future in a linear sense. It was always the next anomaly, the next mission, the next adventure. And sure all their futures seemed happy enough but there was something…off about them that they can’t put their finger on just yet.

Since Spooner is still shimmying through ducts, Astra does a little magic and does a hilarious Spooner impression to see Spooner’s future and buy the real Spooner more time. When Astra sees her best friend’s future, she realizes that thing that feels off: they’re not in each other’s futures. Spooner would go back to 1925 and start a mental health clinic. She’d be with her mother, but not her friends. Astra slips and says, “So I’d be alone again.”

Human Gideon corrects “Spooner” saying she’d be with her mother, but Astra’s own personal hell is the loneliness she felt while being the queen of Hell, and she’s not ready to go back to that.

Evil Gideon catches Spooner in the armory and tries to suck her into the temporal zone, and Spooner cries out for Astra, and Astra threatens to blow up the whole ship, Human Gideon included, if anything happens to Spooner.

So Evil Gideon has no choice but to close the airlock. Astra runs to Spooner and says “that’s what best friends are for” which is FINE I GUESS.

Human Gideon is ready to end this and get her friends off the ship and to safety so she calls Ava and Sara to see what the captains are waiting for.

Sara calls Evil Gideon a Time Fascist and she and her wife express their concerns with leaving the timeline as someone else’s responsibility: they’ve changed the timeline for the better more times than they can count, all by having a little heart and being willing to make sacrifices. Whoever guards the timeline has to know that change can be good. It doesn’t need a cold, emotionless AI…and then Human Gideon knows what the timeline needs. It needs her.

The rules are there must always be (at least) one captain and one AI, but there are no rules that they can’t sort of be one in the same.

Ava and Sara take this back to the Legends, where there is more debate. Ava points out that they are a bit chaotic to be let loose on the timeline, but Astra says they’re chaotic good.

Zari also wants to keep being a hero and isn’t ready to give that up yet. But the rest of them don’t hate the idea of putting down roots, something they were told might never happen when they were first plucked from their original timelines.

But majority rules, and they swear Human Gideon in as captain and throw themselves a retirement party, complete with a Beebo piñata.

We even get a blurry champagne kiss.

Spooner senses her gal pal’s anger and goes to check in. Astra is indeed mad. What’s the point of having friends if she’s just going to lose them? She can’t imagine her timeline has a happily ever after without Spooner in it.

Spooner has an idea and has Astra do her multiplication trick she used on the nuts on the Magic Manor Key. Now they can all hang out in the pocket dimension, which isn’t against their contract since it exists outside of time.

Spooner hands out most of the keys, but Astra gives Gideon hers personally. Astra is sad to be saying goodbye to her pseudo-daughter, and Gideon just wants to make her sorta-mamma proud. And Astra promises she already does, and wraps her tiny human body in her arms.

Out in the hallway, Sara thinks fondly on the seven years she’s spent on this ship she’s called home. But she thinks she’s ready to put down roots with Ava. They can have a future together; and whatever it looks like, as long as they’re together, they’ll be happy.

Then they get a little randy thinking about being domestic together and not having a sentient AI listening in on them at all times.

In his goodbye, Gary tells Gideon he loves her, and Gideon asks him to stay. He doesn’t technically have an Earth timeline to go “back” to, so he happily agrees.

Behrad wants to do long distance with Astra, and she’s hesitant at first but he charms her into it.

The only one who really isn’t finding the silver lining in all this is Zari. She thought she’d have more time to be a hero, to make her mark. She feels like she’s in Flannel Zari’s shadow, and Fancy Zari doesn’t feel like she matters, doesn’t feel like she helped anyone. Nate attempts a pep talk but frankly there’s a reason he’s not a captain.

Ava asks Gwyn if he’s excited to live with Alun, but he tells her that the Gideons said that’s not possible. But he’s sure they’ll see each other in the afterlife. Ava isn’t comforted by this at all and her heart fully breaks for her little gay buddy.

Ava decides to take matters into her own hands and asks Zari for help. Zari is thrilled to be useful, to maybe have one last chance to make a lasting impact on someone’s life.

Human Gideon overhears this and becomes suspicious; she heads out to cut the Legends off at the pass while also ordering — yes ORDERING — AI Gideon to leave the Legends alone while she’s gone.

Ava and Zari concoct a plan to go back in time and save Alun while still making Gwyn think he’s dead for now, so that he’ll still invent time travel. Zari so desperately wants this hero moment, she’s willing to get dirty and crawl in the air ducts, but then she remembers where there’s another time courier charger: the bathroom.

Gwyn catches them while they’re charging the courier and is so moved that they would be willing to risk their own lives and futures to ensure he has a happy ending of his own. But before Ava and Zari can set out on their mission, Human Gideon strolls in with Alun in tow. The girls are thrilled; this plan worked so well they didn’t even have to execute it.

Gwyn gently explains to Alun about how he was so devastated that he lost him that he invented time travel, and it’s only really now that it strikes me how huge that is: in this universe, queer love birthed TIME TRAVEL. That’s huge! And then, decades later, queer love helped protect it. I love this for us!

When Gwyn tells Alun he loves him, Alun kisses him full on the mouth, which takes Gwyn aback. It seems a little bold for the Alun he knows. To test it, he starts a quote he shared with Ava earlier, something Alun used to say to him a lot. But this Alun doesn’t seem to recognize it. But for now, Gwyn just goes with the flow and rejoins the team.

Human Gideon says goodbye to the Legends, who promise that all she needs to do is call them, beep them, if she ever needs them.

They take a group photo and one by one disappear back into the time stream until it’s just Gary and the Gideons left. Gary surprises Human Gideon with a Parisian dinner, and she tries to act like a human woman instead of an AI-turned-human, which Gary promises she never has to do for him.

When Gary makes her promise she won’t lie to him anymore, she blurts out another lie she told. The Alun she left with Gwyn was a robot. She realized that Alun’s death, being the catalyst for time travel, was a fixed point, and if Ava and Zari had tried to change it, they would have died. So she made the best choice she felt she could in the moment; she knew they’d “break time before they break his heart.” Gideon feels awful for lying, and Gary understands but still needs some time to wrap his head around this. Gary isn’t sure he’s cut out to be the captain’s second.

Now that they’re in different rooms. Evil Gideon tries to drive them apart. When all of her manipulation tactics only drive Gary TOWARD Human Gideon instead of away from her, she yeets him into the time stream, then tells Human Gideon that Gary left her. So Human Gideon tucks away some of those pesky emotions into Lena Luthor’s Little Boxes™ and steels herself for the road ahead. Just a captain and her AI, the way it was meant to be.

Once in the manor, Gwyn decides to take matters into his own hands and yanks the fake Alun’s CPU out of his neck. He’s going to use the tech to fuel his time machine one more time: to save the real Alun.

Next week is the Season 7 finale whose title is vaguely concerning, and I really hope that even though we have no idea, the creators of this show know whether or not they are getting an eighth season. Because this felt very penultimate episode; I’m hoping they realize they’re the only ones who can protect the timeline, TOGETHER, but I’m also hoping they realize it in a “and we have more adventures to go on” way, not in a “fade to black” way, because I know 8 seasons is uncommon for a CW show, and has only been done with Arrow for a Beeboverse show, but I’m just not quite ready to say goodbye!

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