Well, that was fun wasn't it? That's hopefully something I'll be saying to myself a lot during season two of Legends Of Tomorrow. While season one was far from perfect, it still had a lot of solid moments that made it really good escapist fun. When Legends started last year, it was my lowest ranked show in the Flarrowverse, but as time progressed it moved up the rankings and I found myself enjoying Legends the most out of the four on the air. That doesn't mean the show wasn't without it's problems last year though. Hopefully the team behind the scenes took the time during hiatus to figure out how to right the Waverider so that it steers itself into the category of actually being Legendary. Things look promising so far as they have cut the dead weight of the Hawks and closed up the Vandal Savage story while teasing us with the fact that we'll be getting our own Flarrowverse versions of the Legion of Doom and the JSA this year. We actually caught our first glimpse of the premiere at the end of the premiere and how awesome was that? It's no secret that Legends is the lowest rated superhero show on the network, so they have got to pull out all the stops to try and make sure they gain interest and eyeballs and I think that's part of the reason why Out of Time in many ways felt like a reboot of the show. The question now is, was the premiere of Legends 2.0 any good?
The episode opens with a brief little recap of who the legends are and what their mission is. Basically,
Rip Stein says the legends are the only ones left to protect history. (
Note: there are changes from the Screener we were given and the final aired episode, I have updated as necessary) We jump immediately from that to present day Star City as we watch Nate Haywood(New Regular Nick Zano) attempt to break into Mayor Oliver Queen's office. I say attempt because despite some fancy evasion tactics, he gets knocked down right outside the door. Oliver comes out to check on the noise and Nate greets him and tells him that he was trying to bust in because they wouldn't let him without an appointment and we all know they weren't about to give some regular guy an appointment to see the Mayor. Nate tells Ollie that he has to speak him about Sara Lance, Ray Palmer, the rest of the legends and how they are in trouble. Ollie agrees to give him five minutes because Sara and Ray are friends, but he pretends he knows nothing about legends. Nate's reply is of course you do because you're the Green Arrow. Ollie is immediately like get out, Nate apologizes and tells him that he's a historian/time detective and even then it wasn't hard to put together the timeline to figure out that Oliver was/is "Robin Hood"(I mean anyone with a brain and who followed the news probably could). With that out of the way Nate can get to what he really came for, telling Ollie why the legends are in danger. He spills that he knows about the legends and had been tracking them as they trekked through time because he notices the almost imperceptible changes they've left in history. He provides evidence but Oliver just wants him to skip to the part where they are in trouble, so he does. He tells him that their ship was last seen diving into the Atlantic in 1942, the sighting coincided with reports of an atomic bomb also going off in the Atlantic at the same time. Oliver quickly points out how the atomic bomb supposedly wasn't even invented in 1942, and Nate is all like I told you history was changing. Oliver says that if their shipped was hit with an Atomic bomb, then the legends aren't in danger, they're dead. (1.GULP 2. Are they really going to keep referring to them as legends?)
Next thing you know, Oliver and Nate find the Waverider at the bottom of the Atlantic(It is like a scene from
Titanic), and then climb on board and find Mick being kept alive in stasis(as Oliver points out to a clueless Nate). They wake up Mick and he and Oliver exchange tough guy talk because Oliver seems to be over this adventure and just wants to know what happened to the team. Mick gets himself a beer and explains he really has no clue where the team is or what happened. They guys explain more expositional dialogue about why the legends took on their mission, as if we didn't just hear the whole damn recap at the top of the hour but it's mostly to bring Nate up to speed at this point. He explains they were going through time and chasing time criminals and fixing their messes which usually went without problem. Key word being, usually.
That leads us to
France, 1637- where the team was undercover to save King Louis of France from being assasinated. Ray is atom sized and keeping an eye on the king as he prepares to consummate with the Queen, because if they don't consummate, history will be screwed because they won't be screwing. Sara is preparing the Queen for the consummation, when the Queen notices/inquires about Sara's necklace from Laurel and that little moment sparks a flame that heats things up and the two of them start getting frisky. It's good to see Sara getting on with a
Queen again, no? (Okay, I get it, I'm not funny) While Sara is getting busy, the rest of the team is another kind of busy as they are fighting against the King's would be assassins who are armed with laser guns. (It's good to see that despite middling ratings, the effects budget is seemingly still there) The legends end up stopping all of weird hooded laser toting men as a very confused King of France looks on and then they depart in the Waverider as if it's just no big deal the damage they've wrought to the timeline blasting off in the open like that. Back in 2016, Nate is wondering how they went from France to the bottom of the ocean in 1942 while Oliver is saying something along the lines of get on with it, I have a life being uninteresting and wooden somewhere t get to. Mick says it's simple, we went to a time where we were warned not to go. Nate (speaking for viewers new and old) asks who warned him, and Mick says some guy in a hood named Rex Tyler who said if we did go to 1942, we'd be screwed. (Was anyone else upset we didn't actually get to see Rex this episode? The little bit at the end of season 1 was such an epic tease, so I feel so let down.) Oliver then asks the very valid question, if you were told not to go, then why did you? (+10 redemption points in my book for you, Mayor Queen)
So we cut to the moments leading up to decision. Rip lectures the team on screwing up the mission and history once again. A few moments later, the ship experiences a time quake, which is described as a disturbance in the timeline caused by an unusually large aberration. Can you guess when that aberration was?
New York, 1942. (This time quake is a first for Rip, BTW) Turns out the Nazis had nuked New York in 1942 with the help of time traveler altering history in a huge way. (Mick hates Nazi's btw) The allied forces apaprently lost WWII but time hasn't quite caught up the team yet which is why they don't feel any effects yet. The team is pretty gung ho about heading to 1942 to stop it despite Rex's warning, while Rip is cautious as this is what Rex warned about and he doesn't want to risk all of them dying. The team assures him that they've got this but Rip is still hesitant. Sara then makes her way to the library and asks Gideon to pull up everything she can about the "target" in 1942. The Target is Damien Darhk and it seems Sara has been tracking him throughout time in hopes of running across him and avenging Laurel's death. (Good for you Legends team for wanting to do right by Laurel as somebody has to and you know damn sure it won't be the Arrow writers. JK. Maybe.) Ray interrupts her as he probably has an idea that she's up to something because she's spent a lot of time in the library lately. She lies that she's not holding on to anything when Ray asks her and then leaves. Ray and Stein then find out that WWII went on two years longer in this version of history and ended up taking 12 million more lives with it including Albert Einstein or so they thought. Gideon informs them that Einstein went missing just prior to the attack on New York, and Stein and Ray deduce that the Nazi's must've kidnapped him and forced him to make the a-bomb. Their solution is to head back to New York and kidnap Einstein first so they tell Gideon to plot the course.
Rip asks Jax to sit this first mission out. (Not Gonna lie, I for sure thought it was because he was black and they were traveling to 1942) Rip needs Jax to make sure that they have a fully functional time drive, just in case. (Apparently, this is something Rip has been doing a lot of lately, asking Jax to do maintenance on the ship.) Off the ship in 1942, Sara ducks off to visit her grandfather aka find Darhk and Ray decides to tail her. Mick, Rip and Stein head to the "Nerd Party" to get eyes on Einstein(Who is portrayed all sorts of ridiculous here). Einstein is a pig, Mick notes while Stein fawns over him. Stein tells Mick to let him handle speaking to Einstein because he speaks "Physicist" but Einstein is pretty upset that Stein messes up his chances to get physical with two ladies he's chatting up. (UGH) Mick starts to escort him away, but he causes a scene which alerts the Nazis who are there to kidnap Einstein. Gunfire and screaming ensues as Rip takes care of them and very smoothly grabs a drink, while Stein utters an obnoxiously cheesy line and knocks Einstein out. Meanwhile Sara finds Darhk, Ray reveals he's been following her before she can pounce and they both overhear him speaking in german about Uranium to some shady Germans. Sara still wants to pounce but Ray tells Sara if she kills Darhk now, they may not be able to save New York since he's the supplier of the energy source the Nazi's needed for the nuke so they have to wait until they can get to the uranium first. Sara remarks how much she hates Ray sometimes and I nod in agreeance. The team detains Einstein on the ship, but Gideon informs them that timeline hasn't changed and the bomb still gets set off. The Nazi's must've kidnapped someone else. A chat with Einstein reveals that his ex-wife also knows how to make an atomic bomb and now she's gone missing as it turns out while the team was saving Einstein, the Nazi's were kidnapping his Ex-wife.
Ray then spills the beans to Rip about Sara going off after Darhk and how that's how they know that Darhk is supplying the Uranium to the Nazis. I cheered out loud as Sara let Ray have it though, calling him a boy scout and nothing without his suit. The character of Ray Palmer has always been too much of
Dudley Do-Right for me so I liked seeing someone take him down a peg. Ray rolls it off though because without his suit, they wouldn't be able to track and find Darhk in 1942 via the radiation trail the uranium leaves behind. The team finds Darhk as he is about to put the bomb and the ex-wife onto a Nazi submarine, and thye decide now isn't the time to be subtle and try to stop them. Sara goes rogue though and goes straight for Darhk to avenge Laurel. Ray's suit can't disable the bomb, so Rip calls for the team to fall back as things go from bad to worse and Mick gets injured, but Sara is too busy trying to kill Darhk as the plan falls apart behind her. They eventually fall back and get Einstein and his wife to safety on the ship but they don't leave just yet as the Nazis still have a bomb. Rip asks Jax's to do yet another task on the ship and then Jax and Rip have a moment where Jax realizes why Rip has been having him do these odd tasks, as it helped Jax to learn about the Waverider and it's secrets so he'd know them in the event of Rip's absence.
They take the Waverider into the Atlantic ocean while tracking the U-Boat. They get in a good hit on the boat with their missles, but the Nazi's still fire the bomb at Darhk's request. Jax comes in and tells Rip his last request is done and Rip tells the team that he has now set the course of the ship into the path of the bomb and that's he's not sure the ship can take it. Fortunately, he'd been preparing for this moment for some time and he then sends all of the team through time, scattered throughout history. Well, all of the team except Mick because he was injured. Rip knocks Mick out and puts him in stasis as the ship collides with the a-bomb and we catch up to how we found the ship earlier in the episode. Back in 2016, Mick says that he guesses it's up to them to find the rest of the team, but Oliver has better things to do than save his friends, so he suggests that Nate go with Mick since he knows history and stuff. Nate quickly finds information on Ray in the library so they go after him. Nate is weary of Mick's ability to pilot the Waverider but he quickly gets overcome with excitement about traveling through time. They first travel to South Dakota about 70 million years ago, and we see Ray as runs from a T-Rex looking like a madman. Mick saves him with a blast from his heat gun, while Nate throws up. They then travel to Tintangel, England where the year is 821 and Jax and Stein have been posing as wizards (with their cellphone being a magic mirror as one of their tricks) who are about to get their heads chopped off until Nate walks in and crashes the beheading. They getaway and head to 1693 Salem where Sara is about to be hanged for corrupting the women of the village(Typical Sara). She escapes her bondage in typical Sara fashion, because she never really needed the help of the guys anyway, and gets a good whack in on Nate before they are introduced.
The team is now all together, except for Rip. Nate tells the team that he's searched through time and can't find any sign of Rip. They decide to ask Gideon where Rip is, but she doesn't know. Instead, she plays his final message to them, where he basically passes the torch to them on their quest to save time.
"Sorry for stranding you all throughout history, but it was the only way to save you. You know what they say, a captain must never abandon his ship. Well, neither shall I abandon hope of seeing you all again someday, somewhere in time. As flawed and unruly as you are individually, together you are the best crew...the best team a captain could hope for. So stick together and remember, history is yours now my dear legends, good luck" (These aren't tears in my eyes, I'm just over here cutting onions...) Following hearing his message there's moment between the crew where they come to the realization that they have to carry on the mission. There's still a rogue time traveler out there, working with Darhk who seems to really want to do some damage. At Nate's suggestion they decide to safeguard the Einstein family, and head back in time and suggest that Einstein reveal his Ex-Wife as his secret partner as a way to protect them both just in case the time traveler decides to go back and try bombing New York again. Nate watches with Mick and Stein as Einstein does what they asked and he is amazed they just changed history, to which Stein replies that they really just saved it.
Back on the U-Boat, the Nazi's are pissed at Darhk, but Darhk is over it because his partner wants to move on to new things. The angry Nazi remarks his partner isn't even there to which Darhk replies, "Says who?" or something like that. On cue, in zips the Reverse Flash aka Eobard Thawne who takes out the nazi's and then greets Darhk and that's how the episode ends.(The smell of Doom is in the air. Legion of Doom to be precise)
Final Thoughts: Okay. This episode was fun. I loved that Mick got to do a bit more this episode as I was always worried about the character and how he fits in the show sans Snart, but Dominic Purcell really puts a charisma into the character of Mick that really made me forget he once was a package deal. I also really enjoyed the France bit too, it was such a fun little moment that showed nothing had really changed between the team in the six months that have gone by. The big thing for me though was that the premiere felt to have suffered a bit from being a bit disjointed. Starting with the moments after the crash, the ending felt a bit bit rushed. The ending of the episode with finding the legends and Nate being introduced to them felt so tacked on that I mostly found myself annoyed at how blink and miss it felt and it lacked any real emotional weight. I think it would've worked better if they spent an episode actually handling fallout from the time scatter and hunting down the legends, slowly coming to the conclusion about Rip. I think it really took away from the fact that for now Rip is really gone because it was just so casual in execution. It went from the explosion, to about two minutes of setup(if you can even call it that) of Nate and Mick hunting down the legends, to Rip's final words, back to the awful Einstein plot. Speaking of Einstein, I don't know if it was clear but geez did I hate this portrayal and use of him here. They honestly could have cut out all of his speaking bits and the episode probably still could have worked.
Thankfully for Einstein though, he wasn't my least favorite part of the episode. No, that would be Nate. Nate in this episode just came across as Ray 2.0 and I was not here for it. We already have Ray. I don't want another overly enthusiastic do-gooder. I just don't. His setup on the team felt really rushed and kind of ruined the pacing of the episode. Other than that, this was an overall solid opener as it really accomplished what it set out to do which was set the course for the new season and serve as a soft reboot of the show itself. I'm bummed there wasn't more Rex Tyler and that we didn't get to see much of Vixen or the JSA in the premiere especially following last year's finale, (NEXT WEEK LOOKS FORREAL AMAZEBALLS THOUGH) but I am really happy at how Darhk is already proving himself more menacing than Vandal did last year. I also am excited to see how the crew operates without Rip to oversee them. In the end, I still really liked this episode, it felt as if the team behind the scenes was really working to trim the fat and it was a bit more consistent and plot driven. The team still has that oddball dynamic that works so well for them and I love it. Legends has always had the hard task of being the only superhero team-up show on TV so it gets a lot of flack because there's nothing to really compare it to but I think this year we're off to a great start at building a compelling season with compelling characters. There's a lot to look forward to coming off of this premiere and it really makes me excited about the season and what's to come.
B+
What did you think of "Out of Time"? Are you excited about the new season? What are your theories about where Rip is? Did you catch any easter eggs? Sound off Below!
The Next Episode of Legends of Tomorrow entitled "The Justice Society of America" airs Thursday 10/20 at 7pm CT on the CW.
About the Author - Winston Mize
I always have the most trouble coming up with a blurb to describe me. Which is really weird for someone who wants to make a career out of writing. If you think I'm awkward online, it's just because you haven't met me in person. I'd like to think I have other interests outside of TV, and maybe I do, but TV is the one that gets me most excited. I live a pretty boring life so TV's the way I get my fix, and I'd love to chat about it with you. I'm also always looking to guest or start my own podcast, so if you've got the opportunity, I'm in there like swimwear. You can check me out with different previews of various shows or read my reviews of iZombie, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Legends Of Tomorrow here on the site. If you're a fan on One Tree Hill you can check out my podcast about as well by checking out our twitter page @OnlyOthPod.
