written by Kate Danvers

If I were to put the following review in audio format, the last few minutes would be beyond the range of human hearing.

SPOILER WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT

Picking up from last episode, Bishop explains that there’s no antidote for Zaguron venom, and what Sara drank before collapsing was actually a solution of nanobots that did a full-body scan, allowing her to be cloned. After Ava troopers arrive to secure the room he…um…resets himself into the waiting clone with one of their weapons. He finally reveals his full plan: Sara has the mental fortitude to handle the alien upgrades, so the new human race will be all Sara clones, cloud-printed to planets all over the galaxy.

I’d say this is the dumbest villain plan I’ve ever heard, but I’ve watched entire seasons of Arrow and The Flash, so this doesn’t even crack the top ten.

The Legends are taking news of Sara’s death hard. Ava is taking it the hardest, laying in her room and watching David Bowie’s video of Sara on a loop. Nate has appointed himself acting leader and attempts to bring Ava food and check up on her. The other Legends are drinking, except for Zari and Behrad, the latter of whom is reportedly taking Sara’s death very hard.

Mick and Kayla finally leave the pod (that’s going to need to be cleaned with napalm) and find that the barrier has been restored. Kayla starts to hook the fuel cell up to the ship with the intention of leaving as soon as she’s done. After Mick tells her she owes him for saving her life, she reluctantly gives him until the third moon sets to find Sara and get back to the ship.

Nate and Zari go to the lab to find Behrad, but he’s not there. However, his “thinking music” is playing and a sniff of the air tells Nate that B has been smoking his “thinking weed.” Well, that can’t be good.

Yeah, Behrad has gone back to 1977 London and the events of last season’s finale to try to save Sara from being abducted in the first place. Nate, Zari, Spooner, Astra, and Constantine soon follow, wearing what they wore the last time they were there.

SPOONER: “Where the hell are we?”
ASTRA: “Last year’s finale.”
SPOONER: “What’s a finale?”
NATE: “You’ll see. They’re pretty fun. I mean, except for the one where I died.”

Not content to step on my jokes, the writers just outright steal goofs I would use as a stinger image. I guess there is a precedent for that.

They find their Behrad and pull him aside. They’re not there to stop him, though – they’re there to help him do it right. They make plans in the restaurant across from the Hole (the venue the Smell were playing at). They need to not interact with their past selves, get Sara to the Waverider before the aliens arrive, and not involve past or present Ava because she’ll be against altering the timeline. They also realize this means they’ll never meet Spooner.

Behrad realizes it’s Smoke O’Clock, so his past self will be on the roof. He tries unsuccessfully to get Sara to return to the Waverider with him. She’s intent on proposing tonight and she will not be deterred.

In the present on the alien planet, the Avas take Sara away to be incinerated so Bishop can start over with a fresh clone. She breaks free just as Gary, his rebel Avas, and Mick (who they found on the way) arrive to get her. Sara doesn’t want to leave without stopping Bishop, so Nurse Ava suggests blowing up all of the generators at once so the whole facility shuts down. Sara thanks Mick for rescuing her, but he dismisses it as “The ship sucked without you.”

The Legends don’t know why Sara never proposed to Ava that night if she was so set on it. Since Constantine and Zari were having a quickie at that point during the finale night and therefore they won’t need to worry about running into themselves, the two of them go into the club to convince Sara to propose. After briefly bumping into Past Ava, they find Sara throwing up. She’s nervous about the proposal. Constantine tries to convince her to just get it over with, but she wants to do it on her own time. From Constantine’s willingness to go along with the stupid plan to his desperate bid to convince Sara, Zari figures out he doesn’t have his magic anymore. He says that fixing the timeline is the best way to get his magic back.

Past Ava spots Constantine and Zari leaving at the same time that Past Constantine and Zari get back from their quickie, so she follows the two who are acting weird, finds the present Legends, and lectures them about trying to alter the timeline. She then goes off to get blackout drunk so she doesn’t remember any of that. So that’s why she was so hungover in the premiere!

Sara cuts her hand trying to set a bomb on one of the generators. The cut heals in seconds, meaning Bishop did something to alter this clone. She radios the others to delay blowing up the generators while she has a chat with Bishop. She begins this chat by punching him. Good start! He tells her he combined her with an alien and says she should be grateful. She punches him again. Then she injects him with something that numbs and paralyzes him so she can make a clean clone of herself.

The Legends decide they need to get creative: a surgical strike on the timeline, one that will ensure they save Sara without changing anything about their personal timeline. I see. Well, in that case, the best way to do that is to abduct Sara themselves mid-alien abduction and return her to the present so their past selves still think she’s abducted but she’s–

BEHRAD: “No! With an exploding mannequin!”

Okay, so the plan isn’t entirely stupid. The mannequin is filled with fireworks, and it will explode at the same moment the aliens were scattered into the timeline, ensuring that all of that still happens. Still…a lot of stuff happened on that ship prior to the pods being jettisoned. Spartacus was eaten, Kayla fought Sara and got shot into the timestream with the pods, and Gary opened the wormhole into the Temporal Zone. There are a lot of variables.

Spooner goes in the club to keep an eye on the past Legends, but ends up having a conversation with Sara. She tells her about her abduction and fear of being close to people because she might hurt them. Sara suggests they might help her instead. Sara worries she’s going to screw things up with Ava, but Spooner gives Sara her own advice. Sara notices that Ava’s totally wasted, so she delays proposing until Ava sobers up.

When Nate runs to the bathroom, an alternate timeline version of him walks in to warn the Legends against using the exploding mannequin, saying it causes the aliens to land on Wall Street during the gilded age. Constantine dies, Nate joins a magic cult to stop the aliens, and the plan doesn’t even work because Kayla abducts Sara anyway. Spooner calls to warn them that Sara is leaving the club, so Behrad runs outside to stop her from being abducted. To his dismay, he just distracts Sara long enough for the abduction to happen in the first place. This does cause AlterNate to be erased, though.

Sara asks Nurse Ava to make a clone of her without the alien DNA. The bombs on the generators are primed and they’re running out of time to escape. She also newly remembers Behrad trying to warn her, so she’s in more of a hurry to get back before her friends rip the timeline a new one. The cloning process will take about ten minutes. Easy-Bake Assassin! Sara intends to send the human clone back home with Mick and Gary while she stays on this planet.

Mick comes to find Sara but runs into Bishop, who he roasts to death. That activates a digital copy of Bishop that starts uploading to a cloud server, meaning he can be cloned anywhere in the galaxy. The upload is going to take three minutes, so Sara has a choice between making the clean clone of herself or stopping Bishop permanently.

When Mick enters the cloning lab, Sara tells him everything: that she’s a clone, her current body is “wrong,” and he needs to take the new clone with him.

SARA: “I don’t even know what I am anymore, all right? You cannot see it, but I’m damaged.”
MICK: “Damaged? No. I see someone who’s been through hell but never stopped being herself. I see Captain Lance. I see Sara, my oldest friend. We need you. Please.”

Remember when this guy betrayed the team both in Seasons One and Two? Mick Rory, the criminal and arsonist who won’t talk about his feelings? The guy who barely trusted one person in the world, and that was Leonard? The past two episodes have shown how much he’s grown. Maybe it’s being a dad or the other Legends rubbing off on him, but he’s changed.

That convinces Sara to leave, and she tells Gary to blow the generators. The new clone of Sara dissolves before it completes, and Bishop’s consciousness stops uploading at 94% before the base loses power entirely.

The Ava clones decide to stay on the planet because it’s their “home.” Sara, Mick, and Gary run for the ship with Zagurons chasing them. Kayla does a bombing run with the ship to take out some of the Zagurons, then tells everyone to get aboard. Before they can, the aliens attack again. Kayla attacks with her tentacles, but she’s outnumbered and dragged away. The others make it to the ship and wait for Kayla as long as they can, but they’re forced to leave before they get overrun.

Ava is still in her room watching the video again and again. The file gets corrupted, and stops playing just as the real Sara walks in behind her. Just when I think I’m about to cry, Ava makes it worse by saying she’s afraid to turn around because if she does, Sara might disappear. Sara hugs her to show that she’s real, and the two embrace.

Sara realizes where the Legends are and goes to London, where the big reunion takes place. On the way back to the ship, Sara stops waiting. She gets down on one knee to propose. Ava is so excited that she says yes before Sara can even ask. It’s really heckin’ cute. Sara eventually gets the proposal out and Ava says yes and I don’t even watch this show for the shipping but I’m crying. The mannequin bomb that was left in a dumpster explodes, sending fireworks into the sky to celebrate the moment.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

Okay, I’m going to talk about the rest of the episode before I talk about the thing I want to talk about. I feel like it didn’t completely live up to its premise. I was expecting time travel shenanigans on the level of “Legends of To-Meow-Meow” or Groundhog Day-style zaniness like “Here I Go Again.” But I think that would have robbed us of the stuff that was happening in the present with Sara, so maybe that’s for the best.

I know there’s still half a season left to explore the half-alien clone thing. I honestly expected the clone part to hit Sara more than the half-alien part, but her fiancée is a clone, so I guess it makes sense. From the preview, it looks like she gets around to telling Ava and the other Legends about the new version of herself next episode. Maybe I was just expecting more of an existential crisis.

However, I’m really glad that didn’t get in the way of the proposal. I was really expecting Sara to put it off because of what happened to her. Nope; Legends knew what we wanted and it delivered. The relationship that started in Season Three has progressed to the next stage. It’s one of the best-developed relationships I’ve seen in the DC television shows – maybe the best developed. There was chemistry and sexual tension from the start and it blossomed into sappy romance.

I bang the “representation matters” drum a lot, I know, but moments like that mean a lot to me and so many other people. I was born in the ’80s, and I’ve lived long enough to have seen an era of TV where a same-sex relationship between two main characters on a show would be unthinkable. And now I’m living in a time where it’s not common enough to be a big deal, but it’s not something that is going to cause massive protests and write-in campaigns to get the show taken off the air.

I get the absolute pleasure of watching two shows on the same network with LGBTQIA+ representation, and I get to talk about it online. How cool is that? So, I hope you all don’t mind me skipping the usual joke in the stinger image for some fluff.

Next time: Sara and Ava are engaged and the next episode is Old West-themed? Legends, you’re spoiling me.

PREVIOUS | NEXT

Legends of Tomorrow airs Sundays on the CW at 8 ET/7 CT. Kate normally writes something witty here, but her brain turned into mush by the end of this review. For more mush, find her on Twitter @WearyKatie.