The Legends have had an incredible amount of turnover in the last seven seasons. I hope we get to see them have more adventures, with an ever-changing cast (hat-tip to Mick, Lenard, Mona, Rip, the Firestorm boys, Charlie, Ray, the Hawkfolk and any other old-school Legends I’ve forgotten)
Not the Hawkfolk, but the rest were all fun.
Martin Stein is a big miss, I really liked that character.
Amaya & Nora are also missed.
Does Kid Flash count?
I miss John, too.
Where has that production budget been all series? Maybe they managed to get the season done under budget up until then, so they could splurge on the season finale? There were a couple of janky effects, but overall that seemed like the highest production value episode of the entire series. Mike’s walk through the frozen battlefield alone was probably a better effects sequence - with well done prop and costume work - than just about anything the show has ever done before.
That being said…it seemed like they just…forgot to animate Nate’s steel form when he rescued Allan. He deflected bullets with his arm - but it looked like he was in flesh form. But with some corrosion? I guess…maybe most of his steel was completely corroded away, but the discolored spots were actually the bits that were still steel, albeit badly corroded, but still strong enough to deflect bullets?
As to the meat of the episode - that was pretty good. Not my favorite of even this season, but pretty good.
And, yeah, Booster Gold! Now that he’s shown up, it does seem kind of odd that it took seven entire seasons for a DC Comics time travel comedy series to bring in Booster Gold, but I’m glad he showed up. Donald Faison’s Booster Gold is quite a bit different from his typical depictions, but I liked him.
And I’ve got to say, once again, Matt Ryan is really impressing me with his acting. I’m not sure any of their other current cast members could have sold that comforting the dying soldier scene, but I thought he brought genuine humanity and pathos to that scene, with some pretty minimalist acting.
A few more semi-random thoughts:
This show about super-heroes really doesn’t like it’s heroes having super-powers. I get that they don’t have the budget to match their ambitions, especially the early line-up, but it’s still funny how often they just kind of forget their characters have powers. They did actually give Sara powers and revealed Gary as an expensive CGI alien. But just in this episode, they took away Nate’s powers and then wrote him out of the show, took away Sara’s powers (albeit perhaps only temporarily), and Zari gave up her totem and her powers.
So, at this point, Gwyn, Allan, Ava, and probably Booster Gold, are all just normal humans. Sara technically has a hybrid alien physiology, so they can still have the occasional plot contrivance, but no real powers per se, and certainly nothing visible. Spooner has “alien telepathy”, but they’ve never bothered with even any minimal effects for that - she just does the Constipated Concentrating Telepath expression. Gideon is a human super computer, but, again, no actual effects. At this point, we’ve just got Gary in his occasionally-seen CGI Form, Astra’s magic, and Behrad’s totem powers (which he often seems to just forget about), right? …Behrad still has his totem, doesn’t he? I genuinely don’t know…
Speaking of totems, how did Nate even use the Totem that Zari gave him? Don’t you have to be part of the bloodline to use it? Can just anyone pick up a Totem? And when he used the Totem to enter the Totem and took the Totem with him into the Totem…isn’t that the sort of thing that generally rips open rifts to the Astral Plane and causes the item to be forever lost?
Speaking of Nate…in the comics, Nate Heywood/Citizen Steel has a metahuman physiology, where all of his tissues became a sort of organic steel-like substance that looked fleshy but with a metallic sheen. The visual inspiration for his Legends iteration, Colossus of the X-Men, transforms his entire body into “organic steel”. I always assumed that was what was going on with his character. But this episode seems to indicate that his power is actually to extrude a sort of microlayer ablative exodermis of some kind of super-steel.
Which…actually makes a lot more sense, given how his powers have been depicted this whole time. It makes sense that he can be knocked out in steel form - he still has a fleshy brain rattling around inside his skull. He still needs to breath, can be poisoned or drugged, etc. And it even makes sense that he was zombified in the Inevitable Zombie Episode - the zombies eventually wore away his ablative exodermis.
Is that how the writers actually intended that his powers worked this whole time? Was that clear to everyone else, and I just got side-tracked by assuming his powers worked like Comic!Steel and Colossus? If so, mea culpa, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow. I always thought the depictions of Nate’s powers were just sloppy, but maybe they actually were consistent and thought-out.
This didn’t make any sense to me (well, it makes sense from a budgeting perspective). I don’t understand Zari’s motivation for not having a totem.
Other than that, I really quite liked the episode.
The Flash will resume its season 8 in the timeslot just vacated by Legends of Tomorrow. According to report, a character that was “just introduced” on Legends will be seen in the episode. Could they be wearing blue and yellow?
Cancelled, and on a cliffhanger, too. It’s just like the Legends to end up in jail with no way of getting out.
Surprising. But always the odd one out in the Arrowverse.
As it ran quite often on the rule of funny, it was my favorite.
As the article points out the actors/characters could appear in other Arrowverse shows. I would like a proper farewell episode.
Brian