Legends - Betrayal - Review

As I watched the latest episode of Legends, I felt like I was watching three different shows. The good news is that two of those shows were excellent. The bad news is that the third show took up over half of the episode.

First I’ll start with the positive. For supporting characters, Ana and Yuri were outstanding. The actors playing the roles, Necar Zadegan and Alon Aboutboul, delivered such deep, emotional performances as Ana learned about Yuri’s murder and rape of her mother and confronted the man she had grown to think of like a father. Heading into the chemical weapons plot, I wasn’t expecting such a powerful character story, and the emotional conclusion to their arcs will be scenes I expect I’ll remember for a while. It’s too bad the episode ended with both killed off because I would really like to see more of them in the future – Ana especially since her character was more redeemable.

Sean Bean’s scenes with them – whether as Dante Orbach or Martin Odum – were fantastic. A standout scenes was Yuri mockingly asking Dante if they were friends now, putting out his hands in a plea to take off the restraints, but instead getting a knife in his hand. Another was Odum trapped between the Ana and Yuri holding guns, in a three-way standoff, followed by his emotional reaction to Anna’s death.

And that brings me to the second excellent story – slowly teased throughout the episode but coming to a head in the final few minutes – and that is the unhinging of Martin Odum’s mind and emotional state. We’ve seen a fair amount of build up on this for a few episodes now. Odum’s confusion and disorientation as he exits a legend, his doubts upon hearing McComb’s claims that Odum isn’t real, and the emotional impact that his job sometimes puts on him when he was forced to kill a man to maintain his cover are examples.

But while this development has been on a slow burn for a while, Odum seemed to snap a bit as he turned on Crystal – taunting her because she was trying to “manage” him. There’s been some friction and control issues between the two for a while, but it’s easy to forget that Odum is a loose cannon – someone who dropped contact with his team for much of the six months he was Lincoln Dittmann – disobeying procedure and putting the whole operation at risk by falling off the grid.

Near the end of the episode, Odum’s look of animosity toward Crystal after she shot Anna, who was raising her gun, added a chill to the air. This was followed by Odum walking wordlessly out of the room possibly start to flash back to the part of his past that is hidden from him. It was a great way to end the episode and balanced out the dissatisfaction with the first part of the episode, which I’ll get to now.

The third story, which I found lacking, was the FBI plot – the chemical weapons storyline. I need to stop comparing this show to 24 (something that inevitably happens when I watch a plot with so many similarities to the ones that were common on 24), because Legends falls flat in tension, detail, and character development.

On the surface, the Legends chemical weapons storyline had all of the required elements. It had the build up – the bad guys developing the bomb, the double-cross and tension as the FBI lost control of the situation, and the actual deployment of a weapon leading to loss of life. Yet there was something about the tone that made this feel like a cheap copy. It may have been that the team seemed a little too happy in an episode that should have had more gravitas - the chatting between Gates and Crystal about her work relationship with Odum or Maggie’s obvious enjoyment of her job as she performs her surveillance magic. It may be that the supporting characters still feel too two-dimensional. The story missed out in building emotional tension that could have been used to further fuel the breakdown in Odum’s fragile mental stability when the case went south.

Last week I listed out in my review a number of sloppy plot conveniences that pulled me out of the story. This week there was one that I’ll mention. When Yuri tricks Odum in the bank and recovers his gun, he doesn’t shoot Odum. Yes, he thinks Odum is still Dante Orbach, but in his mind Dante is still angry about the doublecross and is a threat to him. It was illogical that he didn’t attempt to take Dante out.

Back to the positive – this storyline left me with some threads for speculation that may or may not be later revealed to be significant. Who was behind the snipers? It could have been Yuri’s team who started shooting when they say the feds, but I didn’t get that feeling. I’m speculating it might be a new player connected to Odum’s memory loss. I’m also wondering, if Odum was having flashbacks at the end of the episode, what triggered them. Was there a similar death to Ana’s in his past? I’m also wondering about the frequently repeated line that the best lies mirror the truth. Is that a hint about Odum’s true identity and a connection between that and his life as an FBI operative?

So what did you think of Betrayal? Let me know in the comments.