written by Kate Danvers
I was trying to think of a good opening joke to go above the fold, but I just finished making the stinger image and all I can think of is “Bae of Squids.”
SPOILER WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT
Picking up from where we left off last episode, Sara correctly guesses that the Bishop she’s talking to is a clone like the Avas. Bishop seems bothered by the notion, saying he’s not like the Avas since there’s only ever one of him and he copies his memories over each time.
Mick and Kayla land the Waverider on the planet. Kayla declines an oxygen mask because Bishop is terraforming the planet. Anything within the electrostatic barrier has an Earth-like atmosphere, but the air outside is toxic. As they leave the ship, a snarling alien approaches the Waverider. The rescue team finds Kayla’s ship, but it’s under guard by Avas. Mick tries to get the drop on one, but he’s surrounded and Kayla takes the opportunity to double back and steal the Waverider…but the Waverider is already being stolen by someone else.
At Constantine’s house, the Legends are making themselves at home, which is annoying John to no end. Behrad gets a dozen pizzas delivered, Ava connects Gideon to an old tube TV, Spooner has installed anti-alien traps, Nate plays Constantine’s guitar, and Astra practices magic. When Constantine complains that the Legends are turning his house into an asylum, Zari takes him out for some tea. It’s all shown in a really good long take that’s over two minutes long.
Once online, Gideon detects a time anomaly at a sanitarium in 1956 New York. An alien went on a rampage there, causing weird bite marks and exploded hearts. The alien had given the name “Sara Lance.” Ava, Nate, and Spooner go to see the patient before the massacre, and it’s Amelia Earhart. They take Amelia back to Constantine’s house, assuming she’s an alien in disguise, but they need a ruse to keep her there so they can properly monitor her.
It’s funny because Constantine complained that they were turning his house into an asylum and then they did the thing.
Sara covers up a security camera in her room just in time for Gary to come up out of the toilet. He’s been traveling through the facility’s sewer pipes because Necrians like him are able to squeeze their bodies through tight spaces like octopuses. He found where the fuel cells are kept. Sara tells him to take a fuel cell to the ship and get it ready to go. She has a plan.
Nate suggests that Spooner and Behrad play “Bad Cop, Behrad Cop” to question Amelia. They can’t get anything from her about Sara, but she tells them where her ship is. They assume it’s a pod, but when Nate and Ava go to investigate, they find the Waverider. Back at the house, Ava gets more aggressive with the interrogation, and Amelia attacks her. Spooner tranquilizes Amelia. Constantine suggests a different tactic: a mind-probing spell that he needs his “assistant” for.
Gary attempts to steal a fuel cell, but is captured when Kayla alerts the Ava troopers to his presence. Is Kayla going to do anything useful this entire rescue mission, or just be a hindrance to everything?
Sara’s plan is to trick Bishop into thinking she’s all for his plan. They plan to discuss it over dinner that evening. In the meantime, Bishop learns about Mick’s capture and orders the barrier deactivated for an hour – just long enough to kill everyone not indoors. The Ava clone tasked with lowering the barrier questions the order because her clone sisters are still out there and Mick has already been captured. Outside, the clones tie Mick to a tree and run for cover.
What a pretty cloud of death.
Constantine coaches Astra before the mind-reading. Ava and Spooner wonder why he doesn’t do it himself, but he brushes that off. During the ritual, Astra sees the real Amelia Earhart’s memories of Earth before being abducted and then experimented on. She gets as far as when Amelia met Sara and Gary before Amelia starts to convulse and transform into an alien. The Legends get away safely and lock the alien in the lab.
Spooner worries she’s going to end up like Amelia because when Alien!Amelia broke free, Spooner hissed at it in its own language. Behrad tells her to not worry about the future or the past and just live in the now.
Gary saves one of the Ava soldiers and brings her inside. Two other Avas get ready to attack him, but a soldier Ava tells them that Gary saved her life. Gary tells them about Legends Ava and how remarkable she is and how remarkable they all are, and how they can be leaders just like his Ava and… Is he starting a revolution? Is Gary leading the Ava Rebellion?
Mick manages to get free and put on his oxygen mask. He finds Kayla on the route back to the ship, suffocating in the planet’s natural atmosphere. She has stolen a fuel cell and is trying to make her escape. He starts to pick up the fuel cell, but stops to share his oxygen mask with Kayla. She asks why, and he just says the fuel cell is heavy. On the way to the ship, Kayla shit-talks the human race, and Mick doesn’t disagree.
MICK: “They’re cowards, liars, cheats, frauds. They betray you, lock you up. Sara’s different. That’s why I have to find her.”
Sara joins Bishop for dinner. He really doesn’t seem to realize she’s playing him. She asks about the storm outside and he just tells her everything – Mick arrived, he dropped the barrier to kill him, he’s probably already dead. That goes over about how you’d expect. She glasses him and punches him repeatedly, but doesn’t kill him.
POV: You done fucked up.
Mick and Kayla make it to the ship, but they’re overrun by Zagurons, the native creatures of the planet (and what Amelia was turned into). They swarm the ship, and since the outer door won’t close all the way, Mick and Kayla take refuge in one of the pods for breathable air…then they start having sex, because I guess conversation would be too much. I’ll also note that a tentacle does the “hand against the fogged glass” thing from Titanic, so Kayla is in her natural form. If I had to deal with that image and all it implies, so do you.
Spooner is called to the lab by Alien!Amelia. It wants to talk, so she leaves her weapons outside. Spooner asks if the alien really is Amelia. It says it was fused with her and fought to break free, and it claims there’s a similar struggle happening in Spooner. She asks the alien about Sara, and it says it killed her, then it attacks Spooner. She’s saved by Ava, who shoots the alien dead and asks Spooner what the alien said about Sara. “It killed her,” she says. Zari comforts Ava.
Sara drags a broken, bloody, and battered Bishop to the cloning lab where a fresh copy of him awaits. She compares herself to Bishop – how they’ve both died and come back, but Sara keeps the scars and learns from them. Bishop says he doesn’t see any scars on Sara. That’s when she notices another body in the cloning lab – one covered by a sheet. The hand sticking out is wearing her rings, including the engagement ring she was going to give Ava. She pulls back the sheet. It’s the real Sara Lance…dead.
Traumatizing as this is, it’s kind of undermined by how many times Sara has died.
The ending of the episode wasn’t too much of a shock, since I wondered about that exact thing when Sara woke up being tended to by Nurse Ava. This presents a lot of questions that I’m sure will be explored later, like: Is this Clone Sara the same person? Sara’s soul played a part in her resurrection the first time around, so does the clone have the same soul or a different soul? We can assume Bishop copied all of her memories and personality over, but…I don’t know, Ship of Theseus and all of that.
This and the next episode continue to show how much Mick has grown since Season One, so I’ll talk more about that in the next review, but I really liked the line I quoted up there about how Mick sees Sara. With Leonard long gone and Ray and other Legends retired or dead, Sara is his new Leonard. He thinks the world of her, and he’s grown into the sort of person who can admit that, even to someone he hardly knows.
Next time: The Legends need to fix things, so hey’re about to do that thing they swore to never do…after the other twenty times they’ve already done it.
Legends of Tomorrow airs Sundays on the CW at 8 ET/7 CT. Kate would never have sex with an alien. Okay, maybe once. Actually, there’s a whole list of aliens from fiction that she would totally do and it might be on Twitter @WearyKatie.