It wouldn’t be a Legends of Tomorrow episode if it didn’t have giant plot holes, and this one had plot holes you could fly the Waverider - nay, the entire Dominator fleet - through, but I don’t care. It had not one, not two, but three superhero pause-and-pose moments. It had an alien invasion. It had history-altering time travel. It had both the Flash and Supergirl speeding across the planet. It had the Hall of Frakken Justice!
It also wouldn’t be a Legends episode without the Legends fuckups. There were only a few but, boy, they were doozies:
Oliver sidelining Supergirl. Why would you sideline the most powerful being on the planet just because you feel uncomfortable? Biggest. Fuckup. Ever.
Heatwave and company stupidly standing over the unconscious Dominator, thereby allowing Agent Smith to get the drop on them.
Going back in time to grab a Dominator for interrogation turned out to be the fuckup that caused the Dominators to invade in the first place. Specifically, they should never have released the Dominator so he could report back to his alien buddies. At least that whole debacle made Cisco realize that he was being a dick to Barry.
The most amusingly WTF moment for me was when Vixen, Steel, and Heatwave went back to 1951. They’re strolling along an open country trail, wondering how they’re going to find an alien. Then the camera pans over and there’s a giant alien ship attacking the US Army. The director for the episode clearly subscribes to the Sergio Leone school of cinematography, where objects out of frame don’t exist until the camera moves to put them in frame (Cf. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly).
I like Martin Stein’s daughter and hope we see more of her. Maybe she could join S.T.A.R. Labs. Lord knows they need the brainpower.
I liked how Heatwave/Mick appears to just shoot flame in a circle around him, not giving a hoot (note that he would not say hoot, except maybe because we are on network TV) about who he hits. I guess his team mates have learned to duck, or keep moving away.
Having lived for three years about fifteen miles from Redmond, OR, my wife and I found their interpretation of the high desert there kind of amusing. At least it wasn’t the rainforest you *usually *see whenever something is set in Oregon.
Does he? I think they’ve established that Supergirl is not in the movie universe, though I’m not 100% sure. Have they mentioned the Bat on Supergirl? And if the Bat exists in her universe, maybe her Oliver Queen can actually be Oliver Queen, not Bruce Wayne II.
IIRC, they’ve mentioned Gotham City, but not whether some masked wrestler dressed up like Dracula angrily hospitalizes the occasional back-alley mugger there.
Invasion! was the first big DC crossover event I read back when I first started collecting comics way back when, so it was fun to see it reinterpreted for TV. The basic premise was the same: alien concern over metahumans. In the comics, it was the storyline that established that some humans in the DC universe have a “meta-gene” - basically a latent mutation that can be “activated” in moments of extreme stress. It explained why some people manifest powers in life-threatening situations, when other people would just die. For example, Barry Allen became The Flash after being struck by lightning and doused with a bunch of chemicals (in the comics, there was no STAR Labs explosion). That would have simply killed most people, but Barry had the meta-gene, and the accident caused it to activate.
One major, glaring difference between the comics version and the TV version is that, in the comics, the Invasion involved a coalition of a whole bunch of alien races. The Dominators served as the “generals”, basically the brains behind the operation. They certainly were not the foot soldiers (and IIRC, were actually fairly fragile, physically). The actual combat roles were mostly filled by Khundians and … Daxamites.
And in the comics, the Dominators didn’t walk around naked, they wore long robes. Why movies and TV always want to show aliens naked is beyond me.
I wonder which comic company came up with the idea first? I was more of a Marvel reader and they definitely had the same concept, that Earth was of special interest/concern because of human’s genetic propensity to occasionally create superpowered beings.
When Felicity is babbling after her first time jaunt (in the LoT episode) I thought I heard her say “Tanagra” (a reference to the ST:TNG episode “Darmok”)? Did anyone else hear that?
Yes. When the time travel messed up her speech, the first two times she tried to talk, only nonsense syllables came out. The third time, she said, “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” — which I guess would be nonsense syllables to anyone who didn’t watch TNG. Do we know if it airs in the Flarrowverse?
ETA: Crap.
I liked that he had a bit of a leadership role. As I’ve mentioned before, he was taken by the timemasters and trained as some sort of temporal bounty hunter or something, so he’s actually got more training and experience with timeships and things than the rest of the crew.
Foolishly, I expected that Dante would be alive again after Cisco’s time travel.
Oliver said if he’d had Barry’s power he would’ve saved his parents. Somewhere Black Canary is asking if she’s chopped liver. And how about Havenrock? 15,000 people dead.
Speaking of Havenrock, I thought Felicity was going to tell Cisco that she redirected Dahrk’s missile there, rather than having it hit a bigger city.
Thanks for jogging my memory. I remember that line (now). Even more hopeful for the real Oliver Queen to be in that universe. So far, Justice League Unlimited got it right, but Smallville and Arrow both gave us watered down Bruce Waynes.
The old guy who turns up to trade Barry to the aliens looks really good considering how old he must be - he was in his mid-to-late 20s in 1951 - so he’s got to be in his 90s in 2016.
In this case, it’s particularly amusing to me, since the promotion for the crossover claimed the Dominators were going to be made to look like how MacFarlaine drew them in Invasion!..which…aside from their faces being excessively lined…not so much.