After the latest horror show that is CW Behind the Scenes – namely, the news that Ruby Rose was bullied, harassed, and abused while on Batwoman; revealed the incredibly unsafe working conditions; and named names while doing so – the Made of Fail review team has opted to go on indefinite hiatus while we decide the future of our CW superhero show reviews.

We do not make this decision lightly. Not only are reviews basically our only content at the moment, but we all genuinely love the shows. It saddens and angers us that the entertainment which gives us so much joy is being produced under abhorrent and abusive conditions. The Batwoman news is only the latest such story of abuses under the Warner Bros. umbrella, but it’s definitely the last straw for some of us.

We at Made of Fail ask that you all support the IATSE and other unions in the entertainment industry to ensure safe working conditions for all.

-Dayna

SPOILER WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT

Gentle readers, I am on two new medications that are kicking my ass, under elevated levels of anxiety because my household is still dealing with Hurricane Ida aftermath, and two days behind on a massive paid gig, so forgive me for currently being three full episodes behind on Supergirl.

Life happens. Here are a few of my takeaways for this episode and general storyline:

• We’re never given an answer for what the Courage Totem was trying to get Kara to do. What exactly was the point where she lacked courage on the day she saved Alex? I can only speculate that maybe it was when Alex scolded her for revealing her powers, but Kara still ended up defying her sister and becoming Supergirl. I sincerely can’t see where she was failing the gauntlet.
• I can’t help but feel like the seven totems are related to the Paragons from Crisis in some way. Courage, Hope, Humanity, etc.? Come on. I can’t be the only one who sees it. (I know there are a few that aren’t represented by Paragons, but it doesn’t feel like a coincidence.)
• The psychic bond between Nyxly and Kara felt a little forced, like the writers had a bunch of ideas for the season that needed to be scratched off a list.
• I will throw a compliment David Harewood’s way for showing us what the normally stoic J’onn would be like if he wore his emotions on his sleeve, and while it was hilarious, it was also very sweet to hear him tell Kara and Alex about the high regard in which he holds them.
• William remains absolutely pointless.
• Alex and Kelly growing closer after last episode is a delight to see, and I love how supportive they are of one another both on and off the battlefield.
• This show is barrelling towards Supercorp at light speed and so help me god if they don’t stick the landing I am going to scream. LET THEM KISS YOU COWARDS

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Supergirl airs Tuesday nights at 9 Eastern/8 Central on the CW. Dayna can be found on Twitter @queenanthai.

SPOILER WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT

“Sometimes you are going to miss things because they are different from your lived experience. It doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person, but we really need to hear each other.”
-Kelly Olsen

Supergirl has never met a metaphor it couldn’t beat you over the head with, but in “Blind Spots” – an episode about the conscious and unconscious ignorance of white people to BIPOC issues – it’s written and acted extraordinarily well. Our own Kelly Olsen, Azie Tesfai, co-wrote this episode with J. Holtham, and it’s obvious she put her heart into it.

Racism is not limited to shouting the N-word while burning crosses on a lawn. Speaking from an American perspective, all white people – whether we like it or not, no matter how good an ally we aspire to be – are born into a systemically racist system that privileges us above non-white people. Throughout our lives, we have to actively unlearn any number of unconscious biases. We do this by surrounding ourselves with people who have different lived experiences based on their skin color, and moving past the knee-jerk “not all white people” response to listening to what they have to say, believing their stories, and helping them when they tell us what they need from us. Kara demonstrates this by acknowledging her mistakes and actively working to be better about not overlooking the needs of those who don’t look exactly like her, and Alex goes out of her way to read anti-racist books and ask Kelly how she can support her.

Elevating BIPOC voices over our own was demonstrated once before this season, when Kara had Orlando tell his story to the city council, but Azie brings it all the way home here as Kelly shows palpable frustration at her friends’ titular blind spots towards National City’s Black community. I’m glad Supergirl is going out of its way to do this because television needs more diverse voices speaking out. Entertainment has a lot of power to influence people’s behavior, more than we’d like to admit, and for white children, it’s entirely possible that this episode and others like it could be their first exposure to anti-racist ideas.

Meanwhile, over in the B-plot, Lena has begun her magic training, while Evil Councilwoman Rankin has been affected by 5th-dimensional energy that allows her to create anything she wants at the cost of other people’s life force. John Diggle from Arrow makes his prerequisite cameo (and with yet another Arrowverse show ending, I can’t help but wonder where they’re going with his story) to give Kelly a helper and confidant, and Kelly herself is finally inspired to take up her brother’s mantle as the Guardian – “an advocate for the people who have lost hope,” as she put it.

As an aside, Orlando Davis’ actor, Jhaleil Swaby, is absolutely riveting and I really hope he gets more work from this.

This was a fantastic episode, and it left me wishing for more episodes by Azie. She’s as great a writer as she is an actress, and I deeply hope one of the other Arrowverse shows pick her up in either capacity now that Supergirl is coming to a close. I have always had the privilege of being represented in superhero media as a white person (female is an entirely different discussion), and I’m so happy that Black kids are getting more and more superheroes who look like them and who face the same issues they do, who can inspire them the same way Supergirl has inspired me for decades.

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Supergirl airs Tuesday nights at 9 Eastern/8 Central on the CW. Dayna can be found on Twitter @queenanthai.

I’m not saying marriage equality saves the world but…okay, that’s exactly what I’m saying.

SPOILER WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT

Picking up from the previous episode, Spooner is unconscious and dying because of her link to the Fountain of Imperium; Constantine is dead, leaving behind a single mushroom; Behrad returns and blames himself for missing the signs of Constantine’s magic addiction; and Mick is fine. Yeah, apparently being completely engulfed in an explosion that destroys both the lab and Gideon’s mainframe is something Mick can shrug off.

Bishop escapes in Kayla’s ship, and his plan commences. Zaguron scouts land on the planet in a drop pod and send out a signal saying that the coast is clear for invasion. More drop pods land and when nightfall hits, they’re going to crack open and destroy the planet. Bishop’s real plan is to restart the human race afterward with him and Sara as the new Adam and Eve.

Dude, she’s just not into you.

Since Bishop thinks like Sara (because that’s totally how DNA works), the Legends come up with a brilliant plan: Shoot down all of Sara’s ideas and only go with plans she would never think of trying! Insubordination day! I like this idea in theory, but the team once magically conjured an amusement park full of mythical creatures. The stuff Sara won’t greenlight in this episode pales in comparison.

This isn’t even, like, one of their top thirty stupidest ideas.

The most outlandish idea? Recruiting Bishop from the past to develop a cure for the poison. Second-most outlandish idea? Behrad says Constantine is alive as a mushroom and they have to eat him if they want to save the world. Sara doesn’t want anyone tripping on shrooms before the alien apocalypse hits, even if it is something she would never consider.

Mushroom!John convinces her otherwise. She eats it and has a vision where Constantine tells her that healing the Fountain won’t be enough, since it no longer considers the human race worthy. He also says that loving someone and being loved is everything and he wishes that had been enough for him. Before the vision ends, he imparts one last bit of wisdom, which a very high Sara gives to the others.

“We are all connected!”

High Sara is adorable and since we never got to see Behrad’s first few weeks on the ship, I’m going to assume this was the norm until Gideon learned to properly cycle the air filters.

NerdBishop’s cure works and Spooner and the Fountain recover, but the invasion is still imminent. Sara decides to do the other thing she wouldn’t do under these circumstances: get married. The brief but really sweet ceremony is interrupted by Bishop, who darkens the sky using a smoke trail from the ship, and the Zagurons attack. The Legends fall back to the house to defend it, but things look bad until Spooner discovers a new power – swapping the powers of her teammates. It’s the “connected” thing, I guess.

It’s not enough, so it’s now or never for Sara and Ava. The Legends huddle around the couple as they say their “I do”s and kiss. A giant wave of energy erupts around them and disintegrates the aliens, because the Fountain of Imperium totally ships Avalance. With his plans thwarted, Bishop is about to just shoot all the Legends, but Mick and Kayla’s eggs hatch and the babies devour him.

Zari finds Constantine alive again – he cut a deal with a demon to separate him from the Fountain, but he decides to part ways with the Legends, giving Zari an old key before he does. Mick is also leaving, choosing to raise his kids together with Kayla. The remaining Legends walk to the Waverider to leave, but another Waverider appears and blows it up.

lolwut?

The wedding was fun and cute. In the lead-up, Ava stresses over her vows and gets good advice from Gary. She asks him to walk her down the aisle, which is really sweet and parallels Mick walking with Sara. Gary is the person there who Ava has known the longest and Mick is the person there who Sara has known the longest. Behrad sings and plays guitar, Nate performs the ceremony because he took an online certification thing, and Oliver and Felicity aren’t there to co-opt the wedding.

I have to talk about this, too.

Spooner sends her mom away before the invasion starts to keep her safe, and a really beautiful thing happens. Astra sees this, knows what it means, knows how it’s going to affect Spooner, and she hugs her. Let me say that again: Astra Logue, former Queen of Hell, comforts her friend, tough gal loner Spooner Cruz. This isn’t my love of lady couples with height differences appreciating the scene…okay, not entirely, but this is a genuinely good “found family” moment that brought a tear to my eye.

This is the end of the road for Mick, at least as a series regular. It is wild to see where he started on The Flash and Season One of Legends and where he is now. At one point, he sits to watch over the eggs while everyone else is off doing stuff, because he abandoned Lita and doesn’t want to make that same mistake again. And when he meets one of his newly hatched alien kids for the first time, he says he loves them. This is not the same Mick Rory who Rip Hunter recruited years ago. He’s still a grumbly, growling bastard, but he’s learned to be a better person.

Unfortunately, John Constantine continues to slip into his old habits. Yes, he saw the error of his ways at the end, but he still sold his soul to free himself from the Fountain. He leaves the Legends because he’s walking a different path or some bullshit, but I think the real reason is that he can’t face them after what he’s done. He only says goodbye to Zari, giving a little closure to their relationship. I hope wherever he ends up, he doesn’t walk alone. He’s the kind of guy who needs good influences. He needs a team to remind him he doesn’t always have to be a “nasty piece of work.”

In conclusion: WIVES!

Yeah, you ain’t getting out of here without appreciating this with me.

So that’s it for Season Six. Again, I think the premise falls apart when you really think about the whole alien angle in a post-Crisis world, but it was pretty solid. Also, Ava and Sara are married! Yaaaaay! Guess we’ll have to wait till next season to find out what’s up with the Waverider blowing up the Waverider. When’s that again?

October 13th? Fuck’s sake.

Next time: We’re moving to Wednesdays! Wait…both shows again? Goddamnit.

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Legends of Tomorrow airs Wednesdays on the CW at 8 ET/7 CT. Kate now has an unrealistic expectation that her own gay wedding will cause a magical explosion that rids the world of evil. Those wedding pictures will be posted on Twitter @WearyKatie.

SPOILER WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT

Lena travels to her mom’s hometown in Newfoundland. Dear reader, this is just a hop, skip, and a ferry ride north of my hometown, so you can see how it caught my interest and I subscribed to its newsletter.

However, I regret to tell you that “Fortune Bay” is a body of water, and there isn’t actually a town called Fortune Bay in Newfoundland as the in-show highway signs would have you believe. Instead, there are a collection of villages with their own distinct names on the shoreline surrounding the bay (one being “Fortune”). I didn’t think it was that difficult to google, but here we are, in the weird pristine British Columbia’d TV version of a mythical land that wants to be a discount Ireland, all the way down to a pub and thin, uneven accents on a group of people that definitely wouldn’t uniformly sound Like That. Yeah, much of the Newfoundland accent sounds very much like an Irish one, but you can cut it with a knife and you can always tell it apart from an actual Irish native. (Hint: one talks fancy and the other’s got a fancy way of talking.)

I mean, seriously, if you wanted to pretend to film in Ireland, just do it. We have a whole film industry devoted to it in the Maritimes. British Columbia does it pretty frequently, too. Or just stop making up towns in the general area you want to set your fiction in. Ferryland’s just right up the coast.

Anyway, Lena goes home, finds out her mom was part of a coven triad that murdered one member’s abusive husband by accident. Lena’s mom took off to marry Lionel Luthor, letting the widow waste away and their third member to await the return of a prodigal daughter in their fake Ireland so an exposition dump can be made. Is Lena a witch? More like SCIENCE WITCH IN NEED OF COVEN THROUPLES.

Did other stuff happen in this episode? Probably, I was just way too mad about Newfoundland for any of it to stick.

And in conclusion, here’s a pack of wild Newfoundlanders so you can see some of what you missed out on:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9eTOIGZkOI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86ayXPC4Cz0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHB32ll7Ce8

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Supergirl airs Tuesday nights at 9 Eastern/8 Central on the CW. Cara can be found on Twitter @virtualcara.

SPOILER WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT

Hello, it is your Made of Fail stunt correspondent, filling in to talk about Episode 6×10 of Supergirl. This will be hilarious, because I haven’t watched the show since maaaaaybe Season Three, and all I really got from Tumblr is that Kara has bangs now.

*pauses*

Dayna has informed me that the bangs grew out in the Phantom Zone, which is for the best, really. Bangs take a lot of maintenance and Kara is very busy.

Plot A: Kara versus gentrification! She and Brainy are doing PSAs that go super viral, and realize they can use those lessons to help convince the City Council to keep low income housing instead of letting Amazon some tech conglomerate take it over. This is a bit heavy handed, but all the facts regarding gentrification and recidivism are accurate.

Plot B: Nyxly makes a “you can have your dead mom back for a day if you get me out of the Phantom zone” bargain with Nia to get back into the real world (where she has no powers) and then convinces Mitch the Weasel (who just wants his ex back so they can go back into the alien menagerie business and live evilly ever after) to help her hunt down Supergirl. They kidnap a scientist who’s been working on cryo-something in order to lure Supergirl to them, where they trick her into disarming the cryobomb with her heat vision. Somehow this gives Nyxly back her powers.

Nyxly then freezes Supergirl to the ground and is all “HAHAHA THIS IS MAGIC AND YOU CAN’T FIGHT MAGIC” and then Supergirl summons…Wikipedia tells me this is Mxyzptlk, and he looks like he could have been played by Spy Kids-era Alan Cumming.

Related to Plot B is Plot C: Nia gets to hang out with her dead mom for the day, confronting dreams and Nia’s fear of her powers, and this seems like it would be very touching for people invested in this.

My main comments: YAY, ALEX AND J’ONN ARE STILL AROUND. ALSO WHERE IS LENA.

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Supergirl airs Tuesday nights at 9 Eastern/8 Central on the CW. Redheadedgirl can be found on Twitter @redheadedgirl.

Bishop’s plan makes no goddamn sense.

SPOILER WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT

Hey folks, before we get into it, I’d like to apologize for the delay in reviews toward the end of this season. In addition to personal life stuff that I won’t get into, I’ve just been feeling a bit of burnout for the past several months. I no longer have the passion I once had in writing these reviews. I still love the shows, but the reviewing part has become like a chore, or worse, a job. *screams of terror*

I’m going to try experimenting with my format a little to make the reviews easier to write, starting with this one. Less of a full recap with commentary and more of a brief synopsis of events expanding on parts I want to discuss and more emphasis on wordy, long-form analysis of plot beats and character motivations. Also, sadly, unless I come up with a joke I really like, I won’t be forcing myself to try to come up with a stinger image each time. Let’s face it, half of them were shit anyway. [EDITOR’S NOTE: They were not.]

We’ll see how the new format works, but there’s also the possibility that writing two reviews a week (Batwoman and Legends) has just burned me out and I need to drop both shows. I still have some time to consider all of that.

Anyway, Bishop’s plan is stupid and dumb.

And don’t think you’re getting off the hook either.

Zari and the Legends confront Constantine, who’s gone full bad guy at this point. I really like the visual shorthand they’re using by having a cigarette tucked behind his ear. The show has gone out of its way to downplay Constantine’s chainsmoking, even making a running gag out of interrupting him in some way every time he tries to light one. Originally it was done because nobody wants to show people smoking on TV since, as harmful and addictive as it is, it’s not a “cool” character trait.

We also see Constantine doing his best to sabotage the things that got him to give up smoking and a lot of his other bad habits: his friends in the Legends and his relationship with Zari. He’s in full bastard mode. Credit where it’s due, Zari isn’t taking his shit. She even tries to slap him, but he’s an astral projection. The real Constantine hijacks the Waverider with Bishop, not knowing that Spooner and Astra are on board listening to their evil plans.

Their search for the fountain takes them to Texas in 1925, and here’s where things get weird. Spooner sees her mom, and over the course of learning about the fountain and Spooner’s own history, the secret of her abduction is revealed. She wasn’t abducted by aliens in the early 2000s – she lived in 1925 with her mother until Texas oil men killed her mother. The Fountain of Imperium sent Spooner to the future to keep her safe and gave her powers. No implants or alien DNA; Spooner was just touched by the Fountain’s magic.

Though why it thought she’d be safer growing up in modern-day Texas is anyone’s guess.

Also the Fountain of Imperium is mushrooms. Wow, revealing plot points without elaborating on the context first makes these reviews a lot sillier, huh?

So…the Fountain is really an alien magic gifted to Earth in the distant past to protect the planet against alien invasion and there are far too many crossovers and episodes of Supergirl for me to sarcastically refer to, so you know the bit. Mushrooms are also an alien organism that coexist with the Fountain, and finding them means Bishop and Constantine finding the Fountain.

Spooner wants to save her mom and her younger self, but that would screw up the timeline. She actually does save her mother from the oil men, and Astra escorts a younger Spooner to the Fountain of Imperium to make sure her abduction happens. Constantine and Bishop are also there. Bishop tricks Constantine into drinking a potion to fool the Fountain into thinking he’s sweet, innocent, younger Spooner so the Fountain’s magic will deem him “worthy.” Unfortunately, repowering Constantine wasn’t part of Bishop’s plan, but killing the Fountain was. Once Constantine connects with the Fountain, the deadly poison that Bishop spiked the potion with starts to kill both him and the Fountain.

The other Legends eventually make it to 1925 with the Kayla’s help. Everyone but Nate and Zari goes to check on the eggs, but they’re rigged with a bomb that starts counting down as soon as they enter the room. They get the eggs out in time, but Mick goes back to get the last one just as the bomb goes off.

A dying Constantine apologizes to Astra for everything and calls her his greatest failure and his greatest accomplishment. He laments that he’s killed the fountain, then as Zari and Nate arrive on the scene, he’s enveloped and consumed by the mushrooms.

Shame, really. John was such a fun guy.

How the fuck was any of this supposed to work, Bishop? As Constantine is dying, Bishop reveals how the Fountain protects the planet from invasion (very poorly as I pointed out), so his grand scheme was to connect Constantine with the Fountain and kill both at once so he could call down an alien invasion. Bishop wants to destroy humanity and start over from scratch because we’re just too much trouble to save.

…okay, he’s got a point on the last part.

In order for all of that to work, he had to know Constantine was powerless, know that he was corrupted by blood magic, know about Spooner, know about Spooner’s connection to the Fountain, know Mick was pregnant, use the pregnancy to get to Mick’s communicator, call Constantine at just the right time to get him on his side, get Spooner’s blood, create the serum to make someone “worthy,” and trick Constantine into taking it.

There is no way he could have known any of that prior to boarding the Waverider, and even then, the entire plan hinges on the Legends not doing the smart thing and killing him the moment he came onboard. This is the kind of 4-D chess bullshit that belongs in Season Four of The Flash.

Constantine’s death was done really well. I think it was fitting that his last words were to Astra because a lot of his regrets are tied to her. His relationship with her mom, his failure to save Astra from being dragged to Hell, how she grew up in Hell and turned evil, how he failed her when she needed him during her rehabilitation, and the way he sees himself in her. The “greatest accomplishment” part might be twofold for him. Yes, he did play a huge part in saving her from Hell eventually, but now Astra has an opportunity to better herself by not repeating Constantine’s mistakes. He takes a sense of pride in knowing that for all of his fuckups, the girl he tried to save won’t turn out like he did.

The revelations about Spooner might have had more impact if we’d had any kind of hint about her true origin. I think the ball was dropped back in “Bad Blood” when she met Fernando and they were dealing with the Fountain. They could have dropped some kind of hint that Spooner had a connection to the Fountain then, or that she sensed something familiar in Fernando since they were both empowered by the Fountain. Regardless, seeing her with her mom in this episode made little Spooner’s abduction all the more heartbreaking.

Next time: Aliens! Shrooms! Alien shrooms! And a wedding.

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Legends of Tomorrow airs Sundays on the CW at 8 ET/7 CT. In lieu of another joke, Kate would like to sincerely thank those of you still reading these reviews for your support and for your patience. She can be found on Twitter @WearyKatie.

It’s the antepenultimate episode of the season and things are just about wrapped up, so it’s time for our heroes to do stupid shit and play right into the hands of the Big Bad so the stakes are raised for the finale! Haven’t we been here before? I feel like we’ve been here before.

SPOILER WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT

YES, OF COURSE IT’S BISHOP. Why was that even a cliffhanger? Bishop claims to be the last clone because Sara ruined his upload and corrupted his data. He’s a changed man, though! He asks for a place among the Legends. Sara says she has a room all picked out for him.

It’s the airlock, right?

No, unfortunately, it’s the force field cell thing in the lab. Whatever happened to the Season One brig?

Zari demands answers from Constantine about the board game experience and his behavior lately. He dismisses her, saying he’s just adapting to his new magic. When she doesn’t get the answers she needs, Zari storms off to find Astra. She tells Zari that if she wants to find out what happened with the Fountain of Imperium, they need to ask Spooner.

Ava wants to talk to Bishop, and that makes sense because she has that serial killer podcast and has always wanted to get into the head of a sociopath. I like this bit of character consistency, because all other character consistency is thrown out the window as Bishop immediately starts getting into her head. Oh, but Ava and Sara are like family to him now. The only family he has left.

Long-lived long-haired bearded villainous mastermind locked in a cell being interrogated by Legends one at a time so that he can easily manipulate them into acting completely out of character to achieve his master plan? I’m sure we’ve been here before.

“Bossy Ava” was always Bishop’s favorite, but Ava exceeded his expectations when she fell in love, because he lowered the oxytocin levels of all the Avas since love hampers productivity. Gosh, is that why Ava has had such a hard time with wedding planning? Maybe they can bond over figuring out seating arrangements! Or he could help with Mick’s pregnancy since the babies require proper nutrients and will otherwise feed on Mick’s brain…and starve…I added that last part. He teaches Ava how to whip up a concoction to pour in Mick’s ear. Problem solved! Bishop is such a helper.

This is infuriating. I know Ava is trying to play along, but you can see cracks forming even in their first conversation as Bishop starts manipulating her. Are they really saying Ava would fall for all of this? That she would be rattled by talking to her “creator?” Why is our confident badass captain so easily reduced to a poor lost child looking for her family?

Outside of the lab/brig, Zari and Astra ask Spooner about what happened in Spain while Bishop reads their lips through the glass. They figure out Spooner’s memory has been altered by a spell and set off to recover her memory while Ava interrogates Bishop again. Bishop asks if there’s something he can do to help Constantine. This is news to Ava, but she insists Constantine is fine.

He’s not.

Johnny, you don’t look so good.

Sara has Gideon running a scan on Bishop to figure out what he is. See, his upload didn’t complete and he only had a partial genetic code to work with, so the rest of his DNA has got to be from some kind of freaky alien, right? Right?

During more mad scientist/daughter bonding, Bishop reveals to Ava that he’s cloned himself over 200 times. He’s tight-lipped about what’s different about this iteration. He helps her pick out music for the wedding, then shows her how to dance to the song as their “father/daughter dance.” Bishop manipulates her some more by telling her how unique and special she is among the Ava clones, and she leaves the room before having a panic attack. When Sara asks about Bishop’s plan, Ava says she thinks he’s just lonely because not everyone has a family – you know, like Ava.

God fucking damn it, I hate this. Ava is absolutely allowed to have character moments like this. A feeling of loneliness, “other”ness, not belonging – and yes, she’s allowed to make mistakes. But: The Legends have been more of a family than the guy who designed her clone model. In another episode, she talked about still having an attachment to her fake parents. And this is a guy she knows is trying to manipulate her, but she allows it. She even gets short with her fiancée for mistrusting the literal bad guy.

I’m sorry, but this is just sloppy writing.

When your boyfriend is spending more time with his evil split personality than he is with you.

Astra uncovers Spooner’s memories and Zari goes to figure out what Constantine has been juicing with. She steals his flask and has Astra check it. Astra identifies it as a “Scarlet Lady” – extremely volatile blood magic that will end up killing Constantine. It isn’t long before Constantine comes looking for the flask. Zari gives him an ultimatum: her or the potion. That finally gets him to throw the flask away and apologize. The two of them head for the manor to lock Constantine in until the last of the Scarlet Lady is flushed from his system.

Sara apologizes for putting too much pressure on Ava with the interrogation and the wedding planning. Then they talk through Ava’s sudden “I am a robot. What is love?” crisis. I’m still really bugged by that, but it’s explained better in this scene. Ava’s family was fake, she didn’t have role models to really show her what a loving family was like, and she has jitters about messing it up. We could have done that without Bishop.

Ava goes over the wedding plans with Sara. Seems Bishop helped Ava pick out things Sara would like with creepy accuracy. Ava runs with that and checks Bishop’s DNA test – he’s 100% human, sure, but he’s only 94% Bishop and 6% Sara Lance. As we all know from every science-fiction cloning story ever, memories are stored in the DNA. And as we’ve learned from multiple past episodes of Legends, the Waverider and Gideon have no safety protocols, so Bishop just recites Sara’s command code to take control of Gideon.

Gideon, honey, you need to stop taking override codes from prisoners. This isn’t entirely on you, though. He was left unattended and someone just left Spooner’s gun on the table. Gotta fill that stupidity quota.

You know, Gideon apologizes for letting him out and seems fully aware of this, but keeps following his orders, implying she’s still bound by protocols against her will. #FreeGideon. Mick goes into labor, Bishop starts locking down the hallways of the Waverider, and Sara fights him in the hallway. Since Bishop “knows everything Sara knows,” she loses the fight because he has all of her skills plus Spooner’s gun…yeah, sure, whatever. While Sara recovers with freaky alien regeneration, Bishop slips into the med bay to deliver the eggs. He removes the communicator from Mick’s ear.

Just as Spooner is about to blast through the door, Bishop opens it and introduces the team to “the newest Legends” – forty-eight eggs. Bishop voluntarily returns to his cell, still keeping up the act of just wanting to help, but we see that he’s pocketed Mick’s communicator.

When Zari leaves Constantine to get him some tea, Bishop calls Constantine to offer him his powers back. Constantine basically tells him to fuck off and rips out his own communicator, but then his dark side appears to tempt him…and when tempting him doesn’t work, he magically throws him around the room and nearly kills him. Dark Constantine offers the flask…that’s somehow here even though Constantine threw it away in the Waverider. Constantine drinks, heals, then calls Bishop about that deal.

How does any of this work? Who cares?

I’ve made my dislike for episodes like this known already, so I won’t continue to harp on about it, but suffice to say that I didn’t like this one. This review took three weeks to write because of a lot of outside factors, but also because this was just a chore to talk about.

There was some good. Zari very clearly isn’t buying Constantine’s bullshit. She may have had her doubts last episode, but she’s got her guard up in this one. Even at the end when she lowers her guard just a little, it’s because she loves John and she’s offering to help him get better. She assures him that she fell in love with the man, not the magic, and there can be a life without sorcery. Alas, Constantine’s demons are too strong and he gets his ass kicked.

Well, now that character progression, common sense, and basic trigger discipline have been ignored in service of setting up the conflict, onto the finale! Final two episodes, save us!

Next time: Bishop’s master plan makes no goddamn sense and I’m going to tell you why.

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Legends of Tomorrow airs Sundays on the CW at 8 ET/7 CT. Kate would have put Bishop out the fucking airlock in the first 30 seconds. That’s it. There is no joke. Find her on Twitter @WearyKatie.

SPOILER WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT

As of last week, Lena has gone off-camera in search of her birth mother, and Brainy is chauffeuring Zor-El to Argo City. Kelly takes their place, returning from orientation at her new post-Obsidian job as a social worker. We have several major plots going on this week, and fortunately most of them integrate. It doesn’t feel like an information overload, and indeed, they are all entertaining. I’m pretty suspicious and hope this is the new norm and not an exception.

Kelly’s social work with alien children in foster care points a finger at the abuses of a prison work program involving the elder brother of a child she worked with. Supergirl and J’onn investigate some thefts by superpowered beings who are “unlikely” to work together (although why they think that when they have five different species on their own team, I don’t know). It doesn’t take long to link the two, and Kara investigates using her reporting credentials, along with her connection from an earlier feature on the launch of the prison’s work release program.

Kara and William discover that Intergang had paid off the prison to use the prisoners to commit high-level thefts. Fighting this turns into a boon for CatCo as Kara helps William get the scoop, along with an exclusive interview with Supergirl regarding the corruption in the prison system, which helps keep Andrea off their backs about focusing on the Super Friends.

Kelly discovers that the woman in charge of the alien foster home is abusing the kids’ power-suppression cuffs, and causing them pain. She forwards some footage to authorities and gets the woman replaced, which also gives Kelly the realization that she wants to officially become Guardian. Alex is one step ahead of her, and had already contacted James to get his mask and blessing for Kelly to pick up the shield.

Meanwhile, Nia is still dreaming about her mom. She’s confronted by Nyxly (previously seen sabotaging Supergirl’s efforts to escape the Phantom Zone), who offers to bring Nia’s mom back to life for one day in exchange for help escaping the dream realm. This has shades of Kara doing questionable things for Astra (a stand-in for Alura, before we learned Argo still existed). Unfortunately, we know how Nyxly operates, so when Nia agrees it’s a pretty good indicator things will go sideways for our heroes. Possibly in song form. We’ll soon find out!

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Supergirl airs Tuesday nights at 9 Eastern/8 Central on the CW. Cara can be found on Twitter @virtualcara.

SPOILER WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT

We return already knowing that Kara and her father, Zor-El, have been rescued from the Phantom Zone. Zor-El got off pretty easy, but Kara, having blown out her powers, doesn’t get to pass “Go” and is put straight into a sun bed, which gives the team an opportunity to organize a welcome-back party with Kara’s favorite thing: food. As it turns out, Kara’s other favorite thing is in attendance: Lena! Kara attributes her rescue to Lena’s contributions. After a tearful embrace, Kara attempts to go in for a kiss, only to be interrupted by clam jammer Alex, who is supposed to be the one who fills the role of the Designated Lesbian.

Listen, folks: Nobody on this show is straight, and we’ll all be better off if this is recognized. Even our straight shooter J’onn is a goddamn shapeshifter and nothing is physically stopping him from living his life as a different gender, as evidenced by the sheer number of times he’s impersonated Kara herself. Let Kara and Lena kiss, goddamn it! They deserve to have nice things.

Meanwhile, the rest of this episode is excellent. Kara has difficulty with some PTSD from her Phantom Zone adventure, but is given support by her family to adjust to the trauma. Zor-El deals with getting all of his super-powers at once, while his own trauma of being unable to save Krypton emerges. This is the main plot of this week’s episode, where he attempts to save Earth from climate-related doom as a way of compensating, but he goes overboard in a highly emotional arc that surprisingly doesn’t take ten episodes to resolve.

Supergirl ends up dumping the garbage island polluting the ocean into the sun, and Zor-El decides to head to Argo City to reunite with Alura, something he had been trying to avoid. The only unsatisfying thing about this is that Clark wasn’t involved (although Kara and Zor-El visit the Fortress of Solitude and break Kelex).

Elsewhere, Lena and Nia commiserate over their absent mothers, prompting Lena to go on a road trip to track down her biological mother. Nia dreams about hers, which sets up next week’s episode. Andrea is under pressure from advertisers to bring up Catco’s ratings, and zeroes in on getting her reporters to become besties with the “Super Friends.” Alex also opens up to Kara about how she felt when Kara was trapped in the Phantom Zone. All in all, a very honest, well-executed episode to kick off the final arc.

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Supergirl airs Tuesday nights at 9 Eastern/8 Central on the CW. Cara can be found on Twitter @virtualcara.

Darmok with the candlestick at Tanagra.

Look, all of my other references are going to be way too nerdy; I might as well start above the cut.

SPOILER WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT

Picking up from the previous episode, the Legends have bowled a few games, Z swaps places with “Fancy Z” (I’m still calling them Z and Zari), and they all prepare to return home. Unfortunately, the magic warp across the universe fried the jump drive, so they need to take the long way. The long way being a three-week trip through space.

Sara and Ava plan their wedding. Invites are in four groups: Group A) people who need to be there; Group B) people who they want there but it’s okay if they can’t make it; Group C) the polite invitations to the people they hope don’t show up; and Group D) people they’re going to tell they’re getting married after the wedding. Ava explains Group D.

AVA: “You know that if Barry and Iris show up, there is a 100% chance that our special day will be blown up by a supervillain.”

Or Nazis. Or Oliver Queen proposing to his girlfriend and co-opting the wedding. Actually, are there any safe bets in your circle of friends? But yeah, definitely don’t invite Barry and Iris.

Tensions run high when the Legends are forced to conserve power. With no electronics to keep them busy, Sara takes Gary’s suggestion of a board game. Gary introduces them to Beast/Slayers, a gothic horror game where the players have to figure out which of them is the Beast. Constantine – still high as fuck on forbidden blood magic – casts a spell to put all of them into the game.

Time to get a Clue. …get it? Because it’s like the board game. Sort of. I guess if you’ve never played Mafia or Werewolf. Oh hey, anyone remember Town of Salem?

While the players sit down for dinner, an alarm goes off on the Waverider. There’s a ship approaching them. Since Gary and Mick are the only ones outside of the game, they handle it. Mick recognizes the ship as Bishop’s and prepares for a fight, but when the ship docks, it’s Kayla.

In the game, the lights go out and the Beast claims its first victim: Ava, the Detective. I say “claims a victim,” but she just has a little “DEAD” card safety-pinned to her vest. Since she’s “dead,” she can’t speak, so she goes into the other room while the others deliberate on the killer’s identity.

Not taking the game seriously, the players vote for Nate. He’s immediately stabbed in the back and falls to the floor dead. Actually dead. With blood and a dagger and stuff. Constantine coughs up blood, which is taken as him becoming more like his character, a Consumptive Doctor. The game is becoming more real, so Sara checks on Ava, who’s now actually dead in the foyer. Sara demands the game end, but the lights go out and Sara dies as well.

Constantine is unable to end the spell, so they’re trapped until the game is over. Spooner reads the rules and learns that if the Beast wins, the role cards are dealt again and the game continues, meaning they could be trapped forever.

This is by far the most tragic death in the Arrowverse. I cried.

After Mick and Gary patch Kayla up in the med bay by printing a replacement tentacle for her (remember that thing that printed Leonard a new hand waaaaaay back in Season One?), she gets to work trying to fix the Waverider. Gary advises Mick not to tell Kayla about the pregnancy on the off chance she takes it poorly or does some kind of mantis thing. Kayla is hiding secrets of her own, though, as she plants a device on the engine while she’s working on it.

The surviving players split up. Astra and Spooner try to find an exit, but they just keep looping through the house. Behrad goes off to find them and leaves Zari alone with Constantine. Zari leaves Constantine alone to get some ice for him. Astra and Spooner are both killed, and Zari comes across Behrad just after he’s discovered the bodies.

I’d like to take a moment to do a little non-promotional thing. The CW website is garbage. Absolute unusable trash. Their player is so buggy that I have to refresh the page multiple times while reviewing because I pause and play a lot while writing recaps. Unfortunately, it’s the only thing I can use because I can’t get screengrabs from YouTubeTV anymore. Like a lot of websites now, the CW’s is more interested in serving ads than providing a good user experience. Fuck that website.

Gary finds Kayla’s missing tentacle, which is using the “meat printer” in the med bay. The tentacle attacks Gary just as Kayla finishes fixing the jump drive. She aims Mick’s flamethrower at him, saying that while Mick left her to die, “he” saved her and now she owes “him.” Oooooh shit. Mick reveals he’s pregnant, which causes Kayla to hesitate before doing a little neck pinch on him to knock him out.

Mick’s pregnancy also causes him to grow a full head of hair because funny, I guess?

Constantine and Behrad accuse each other of being the killer, forcing Zari to choose between them, but she refuses. Constantine runs off alone, leaving the two siblings to bicker. Behrad points out how sus Constantine has been acting ever since he regained his magic. Zari admits she loves Constantine, and that changes the tone of the discussion. Behrad switches to the supportive brother role and encourages Zari to tell Constantine how she feels…but Constantine is acting mad sus, so it’s time to put him out the airlock.

In the attic, Constantine is confronted by the Beast – a man in a plague doctor getup. The Beast says that every drink of the magic-boosting potion just makes the Beast stronger. He says Constantine loves this world and the power and the magic and the Beast himself. Constantine retaliates by punching the Beast’s mask off and revealing…Constantine. Well, it’s his dark side/self-destructive habits/etc. brought to life by the magic and given a playground by the board game spell.

Aha! So consumption was just a red herring!

Constantine attacks his double and the fight alerts Zari and Behrad. When they enter, the Beast’s back is to them so they can’t see who it is. Zari stabs the Beast and ends the game. Constantine shrugs off the inconsistency in the rules about how the Beast wasn’t any of them, and the Legends look outside to see they’re back on Earth! Also the tentacle is slithering around the ship alone.

I guess the real impostor was AMONG US the whole time! You get it? Because Among Us is like Werewolf and Mafia and I’ve been saying “sus” which is a thing people who play the game say…? Just laugh at the damn joke before Fortnite steals it.

Spooner catches the tentacle, Behrad leaves on a trip to his century to visit his parents, and Constantine heads back to his house. There, he tries to pour out the potion but can’t bring himself to do it. Zari brings him tea later while he’s sleeping on the couch and she notices a wound on his back, right where she stabbed the Beast in the game.

On the ship, the Legends find Mick unconscious and rush to his aid, but Sara is drawn to the library by someone playing “Space Girl.” She opens the door and is shocked by what she sees…but we won’t find out what it is until next episode, I guess.

It’s Bishop, though.

I hate saying this, because this was a good episode and a fun episode, but I think the premise was kind of wasted. We’ve seen other episodes make better use of the Legends being in scenarios where they have to act out roles, and the whole murder mystery just wasn’t there. They could have run their own version of the Clue film and really had fun with it. We did have some cute moments early on of the Legends trying to play their characters, but I would have liked more of that.

It did move the Constantine storyline forward, which I guess was ultimately the aim of the episode. The past couple of episodes he’s been using magic for a lot of unnecessary things and walking around like he’s high as fuck. It’s natural that someone noticed, and I like that it was Behrad, but he dropped his suspicions a little too early because we had to have the bit about Zari confessing her love for Constantine.

It’s cool that Behrad is supportive of his sister and encouraging of a relationship that makes her happy, but not thirty seconds earlier he was certain that Constantine was in some kind of trouble. I get it, it’s the CW, we have to reference a romance subplot every five minutes or the shippers get hangry, but that’s like Season One levels of ignoring obvious danger to set up the final conflicts of the season.

Next time: OF COURSE IT’S FUCKING BISHOP, WHO DID YOU THINK IT WAS??

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Legends of Tomorrow airs Sundays on the CW at 8 ET/7 CT. Kate will tell you that a vent report bluff is risky in early game but can be pulled off by feigning uncertainty. The real strategy is the crowd kill followed by panicked disbelief because it sets everyone against each other. She lost all of her friends playing that game. Please be her friend on Twitter @WearyKatie.

The Bowling Alley at the End of the Universe.

SPOILER WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT

While Nate and Z are off on a date, Ava is picking out a wedding dress, and Constantine is getting a handle on his new souped-up magic, the ground team is searching for an alien pod. Sara, Mick, Spooner, and Astra find a pod in a junkyard, but instead of an alien, they find a metal box. The device activates and transports the four of them to a bowling alley floating on an asteroid out in space.

Okay, yeah, I’ve reached the point where weird shit on this show is mundane. This isn’t even the weirdest this episode.

Sara learns from Buddy, the owner and creator of the bowling alley, that he learned about bowling from Earth, and he loves it. He created the Galaxy Lanes to share that love with the universe, and everyone there except the Legends only appears human. The box that the Legends found was an “invitation.”

Not everything is gutter balls and ripoff claw machines – a group of bowlers have been bullying other players and challenging them to games they can’t win. They’re responsible for the invitations, abducting people against their will, and making Galaxy Lanes a nightmare. Buddy asks Sara to take the “Pin Killers” down and return control of the establishment to him.

There was a bowling alley near where I grew up. Didn’t really have “teams” or aliens or alien teams. It was mostly for birthday parties, Girl Scout and Boy Scout groups, and local fraternal orders…oh shit, maybe we did have aliens?

At the same time, Spooner is chatting up people in the bowling alley to find a ride back to Earth. The leader of the bullies, Mike the Strike, offers to take the Legends to Earth if they can beat him and his team. Spooner accepts, but has to wait until the Pin Killers finish their current game against some redshirts.

No seriously, they’re wearing red shirts.

Nate and Z are camping in Alaska and not having a good time. Their campsite is already booked by a couple of glampers, Nate accidentally brought Spooner’s bag, and all they have to eat are Spooner’s MREs. Their time courier and comms aren’t working, so Z uses a radio from Spooner’s bag to get a signal. They pick up a signal from a panicked announcer who says that the sun has vanished, it’s night everywhere on the planet, and massive chasms have appeared in Alaska, Canada, and Mexico.

While they’re waiting for the other game to end, the Legends warm up. Sara is a natural, Spooner has been bowling since she was thirteen and is also ridiculously good, but Mick won’t remove his gloves and Astra just refuses to bowl at all. They soon find out what happens to the losers when the redshirts lose and dissolve into dust that becomes part of a bowling ball in Mike’s trophy case.

“Mr. Strike, I don’t feel so good.”

Constantine is itching to get out in the field and use magic, so he suggests going to help the field team. Gideon can’t get back to Earth though, and they don’t want to worry Ava, so Gary distracts her by “helping” her pick a wedding dress. Constantine takes a shot of magic booster and casts a spell using the four elements of Earth: earth, wind, fire, and water. Cool, they can get three of those just from their music collection. The spell works and the Waverider is transported into space just outside of Galaxy Lanes. Ava couriers into the foyer or something just outside, but can’t get through the main doors because the Pin Killers control those.

Worse yet, Sara sees Ava in her wedding dress! (Don’t worry, I’ll show a screencap of that atrocity eventually.)

But why did the spell, which was intended to locate Earth, bring them to the bowling alley? Well, because Earth is in the bowling alley…in Mike’s bowling bag. Earth has become a bowling ball, and Mike is using it to play because this is Legends of Tomorrow. The Earth shakes for Z and Nate as it rolls down the lane, and they soon find one of the massive chasms described on the radio: one of the ball’s finger holes.

I’d like to point out that the other Arrowverse shows still happen in the same timeline as Legends, so Ryan, Kara, Barry, Jefferson, and Clark are experiencing all of this and wondering what the fuck. Also, none of them showed up to help. Guess it’s more up the Legends’ alley.

Astra observes that’s some god-level power Mike is wielding, but he says he’s not a god, just a guy who likes bowling….eh, I have a theory. Let’s put a pin in that for now. The Legends are falling apart, so Sara calls a timeout and talks to Buddy. He says bowling should be about fun, so Sara orders some nachos and turns off the scoreboard for their lane to take some of the pressure off.

The team starts to bond. Mick shows Spooner the burns on his hands and arms, saying that his past isn’t for everyone to see. She cuts two fingers and the thumb out of the glove so he can still bowl. Mick’s game drastically improves, and Astra joins in but is still inexperienced. I’d criticize her, but I’m not much of a bowler either, so I want to stay in my lane. The Legends need a miracle.

There’s some requisite CW relationship drama with Nate and Z, but I’ll spare you the details. Z grabs one of Spooner’s laser guns out of her bag and prepares to fire it at whatever keeps coming from the sky to enter the chasm. Nate points out that the gun is currently set to Level Three, but goes all the way up to a drawing of a middle finger. So Z shoots Mike the Strike’s middle finger with the laser on the middle finger setting. Mike is hurt enough that he throws a gutter ball as Nate’s time courier reactivates, and Nate and Z port out of the forest just before the backdraft from the weapon ignites the forest around them.

The Waverider crew are still keeping score, but in order to win, Astra needs to roll a strike on the last shot. Sara instructs Astra to bowl “granny style” and she makes the strike to win the game. Sara takes the Earth from Mike and bowls it out the exit door, sending it hurtling through space back to its home orbit. The Pin Killers leave in defeat, the Legends celebrate with a round of bowling, and Buddy senses very strong power coming from Constantine that will “be the death of him.” Buddy takes a photo of the team.

Not their most awkward team photo, but probably going to be one used for bittersweet memories after some of them die or leave the team.

Bonus image of that awful dress:

Oh honey, no. Take that off immediately. …because it’s ugly, y’all. Get your minds out of the gutter.

This was a fun episode directed by Jes Macallan (Ava Sharpe). Just the type of episode I like from Legends – silly, implausible, and heartwarming. They saved the world by bowling; what more could you want? I said in the last review that the premise for this episode seemed very Douglas Adams, and the episode itself delivered on that pretty well.

Now…let’s talk theories. “Mike the Strike” was played by actor Nic Bishop in this episode. And if that name sounds familiar, it’s because he also played General Kilgore in “Bay of Squids” and Levi Stapleton in “Stressed Western.” Now, the obvious answer might be that they just liked the actor and brought him back for multiple roles, especially because it was convenient given that he’s dating Jes Macallan. But I propose a theory…

What if Kilgore, Stapleton, and Mike are all the same person? Kilgore and Stapleton could easily have just been regular guys who looked alike and just happened to be villains the Legends came across. Then there’s Mike. They dismissed how powerful he was pretty hard when it was brought up. He’s able to turn planets into bowling balls with ease. Who’s to say he’s not some kind of powerful entity who faked his death two other times? Could they be setting up a recurring villain for next season or giving us previews of the villain for the finale?

Like I said, it may be as simple as Nic already being close to the show through Jes and also being a great actor. They’ve reused actors before, so it’s not unheard of. It just seems a little weird to have three minor villains played by the same guy.

Next time: a murder mystery game! I’m going to guess the killer was Spooner in the library with the BFG 9000.

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Legends of Tomorrow airs Sundays on the CW at 8 ET/7 CT. Coincidentally, the bowling alley from Kate’s childhood actually did burn down. She jokes because it’s better than feeling sad. Read more sad musings disguised as jokes on her Twitter @WearyKatie.

*Taylor Swift song intensifies*

SPOILER WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT

Constantine interrogates the living painting Aleister Crowley for the location of his map to the Fountain of Imperium. Under threat of desecration, Crowley tells him he gave it to a banker for safekeeping. The banker turns out to be a vampire by the name of Noelle. He tricks her into giving up the painting for free, but she also offers some sort of magic-boosting potion.

Constantine recruits Spooner for her ability to read and speak alien languages. He knows the map points to Spain, but Spooner is able to narrow it down to Albacete in 1939, at the tail end of the Spanish Civil War. They hit the local tavern looking for more information and are initially taken for fascist spies, but Constantine knows enough history to convince the locals that he’s a Republic soldier. John, did you do proper research before the mission? Are you sure you’re a Legend?

They ask about El Gato, a man who has reportedly survived attacks that should have killed him. They’re told a bogus story about the milk from a donkey giving him supernatural durability, so they leave. Assuming the man they spoke to was El Gato and noticing how shifty people in the tavern were acting, they check out the cellar underneath and find a mute boy named Fernando, who’s giving off a strong alien signal. He’s been drinking from the fountain.

Above, they hear Nationalist soldiers entering the tavern, led by Captain Noriega. He’s looking for the fountain on behalf of Adolf Hitler. He also mentions the Spear of Destiny and the Loom of Fate as two objects he’s done research on. So yeah, the Fountain of Imperium is on that level. When El Gato reveals himself, Noriega shoots him. Fernando runs in and revives El Gato with magic. Noriega has everyone in the tavern arrested – including Spooner – while Constantine escapes.

El Gato’s downfall was direct capture….sorry, I’m a fucking nerd. See, Elgato is a brand that makes hardware and software used in streaming video games to sites like Twitch and a direct capture is–hang on, I’m being forcibly dragged from the keyboard.

Back on the Waverider, the other Legends (minus Sara and Ava) are babysitting Gus-Gus, but they run into a problem when he rapidly ages to adulthood and becomes a terror. Mick and Lita are trapped in the mess hall, but Mick starts to have bad headaches. Fearing this is it, she wants to get him to the med bay, but he refuses. He thinks he deserves to die for his past and for abandoning Kayla. Lita suddenly goes into labor. Mick pushes her through the corridor on an office chair while the other Legends distract Gus-Gus. A combination of two wind totems and Mick’s flamethrower push Gus-Gus through an open time portal into a forested area.

Z: “Tarazi siblings…”
BEHRAD: “…Activate!”

Did they just…? This goddamn show is always stealing my jokes!

Noriega tortures El Gato and learns that Fernando is El Gato’s nephew. Noriega threatens to kill Spooner if Fernando doesn’t tell him where the fountain is. Constantine arrives, posing as a priest from the Vatican. He claims the Vatican is also looking for the fountain and performs a ceremony to “telepathically link the minds” of Fernando and Spooner. Spooner uses her powers to ask Fernando about the fountain. Fernando explains that he found a cave when he was trying to find a way to help his uncle, who was injured in an explosion. An angel in the cave told him to drink from the fountain, and when he did, he gained the ability to heal his uncle. He says he can lead Spooner and Constantine to the fountain.

I gave up my religion years ago, and I wasn’t even Catholic, but John Constantine posing as a priest feels very sacrilegious.

Constantine asks the bartender for water, allowing her to get a rifle hidden behind the bar and turn the tables on Noriega and his men long enough for Spooner, Fernando, and Constantine to escape. Spooner wants to go back, but Constantine reminds her that history already decided who won this war. Spooner asks him to give her a reason to stay there and risk her life to get his magic back.

CONSTANTINE: “You know, where I’m from, being normal is being crushed under the boot of capitalism and then blaming it on anyone with brown skin. It’s being told that only degenerates can fancy men and women. It’s your old man coming home drunk every night and beating you to a pulp because that’s what his old man done to him. But magic, Spooner – the ability to break the rules, to stick it to the rich and the powerful – that’s who I am. And I’m nothing without it, Spooner. I’m nothing.”

Fuck. That got a little too real. I know he’s describing the U.K., but that easily applies to the U.S. This is one of those episodes where we really get to see a lot of what makes John Constantine who he is – something that Legends doesn’t indulge in too often because the character in his natural comic environment sometimes gets fucking bleak.

Spooner agrees to help and they find the cave with the fountain, but it’s dried up. Constantine then tries to convince Spooner to use her connection to Fernando to transfer the boy’s magic to him. He claims it’s to give Fernando a normal life, but Spooner sees through John’s bullshit. He doesn’t care about Fernando; he just wants his magic. She attempts to transfer the power anyway, and it seems to be working, but the power goes back to the fountain and disappears. Spooner recalls the prophecy from the map: Only the worthy can drink from the fountain.

Noriega and his men arrive, so Constantine tells Spooner and Fernando to hide while he deals with them. He takes out the magic potion from earlier, drinks it, and then kills all of the soldiers. The effects, the camera angles, the sound effects, and the music make it very clear that this isn’t a hero moment. This isn’t a triumph. This is horrifying. Constantine passes out.

Though I’m sure if Twitter sees this scene, there will be screencaps and gifs saying “EHRMAHGRD, BISEXUAL LIGHTING!”

On the Waverider, it turns out that Lita faked her labor to get Mick to the med bay, because she thought he was in real labor. Gideon does a scan and assures them he isn’t, and the headaches are normal for someone with forty-eight Necrian eggs in their skull. Gideon brings up the scan showing the eggs, and Lita tells Mick that those little ones need their dad to survive, just like she does. Gary, Ava, and Sara walk in just in time to gush over the first ultrasound. Guys, Mick has a fucking egg clutch in his skull. Like, I know, baby cute, but much as we joke about Mick being brainless, the human skull isn’t meant to contain forty-eight of anything.

Constantine, Spooner, and Fernando make it back to the tavern to find everyone alive. Fernando reunites with his uncle. Constantine and Spooner return to Constantine’s house in the present. He’s worried that he’s damned himself all over again by killing the soldiers like that. They have a heart-to-heart chat where Spooner says she regrets giving up on her mother. Constantine tells her that she still has time – she’s got a timeship. While Spooner is distracted by the snoring Crowley painting, Constantine drinks the last few drops of the potion, giving him just enough magic to hypnotize Spooner into believing that he drank from the Fountain of Imperium and got his magic back.

As Spooner goes upstairs to sleep, Noelle brings Constantine more of the potion in exchange for Crowley.

This is going to come back to bite him! …Sorry, I’ve been off for a few weeks.

Goddamnit, John. Obviously the liquid magic is some dangerous and probably addictive stuff. And Constantine just went off on Astra about taking shortcuts to learn magic faster. Really, that’s just Constantine in a nutshell. When brought to his lowest, he will find a way to go lower and hit some really dark places before he allows himself to rise up again. He’s a terribly flawed character, and that’s what I like about him.

That said, I hope Spooner figures out what he did and kicks him in the dick.

I think the thing that bothered me most about this episode was the side plot. There was a lot going on in the main plot, I know, but the side plot with Gus-Gus growing up and rampaging through the ship could honestly have been told in about five minutes. Cutting from the main plot every few scenes to do fifteen to twenty seconds of the ship plot stretched it out way too much.

Next time: The Legends are abducted by aliens and trapped in a bowling alley floating in space, which is about the most Douglas Adams this show has ever gotten.

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Legends of Tomorrow airs Sundays on the CW at 8 ET/7 CT. Kate prefers her vampires to be a bit taller with a very wide brim hat and yes, she’s still on about the goddamn 9’6″ vampire lady. Her thirst tweets can be found on Twitter @WearyKatie.

Episode 6×09 deals with a fake sitcom set in apartment 420.

Nice.

SPOILER WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT

Behrad wakes up late for a team meeting. After he takes a few minutes to locate his totem, Gideon wishes him a happy birthday. At the meeting, the other Legends are too distracted by the pod tracker to remember his birthday. To be fair, Behrad himself needed Gideon to remind him.

The pod’s trajectory shows it’s going to land in Vancouver in the year 2023. Should be a short trip – that’s just outside the Waverider set. Ava tries to give a Sara-style sendoff, but falls flat. Sara offers “Raincouver,” which feels like the first of many fourth-wall breaks this episode. Zari and Behrad pull a “Tornado Twins powers, activate!” to summon Nate from their totems mid-date with Zari 1.0.

Mick calls Lita, who is surprised to hear from him – apparently the time jump to two years in the future messed with personal timelines and she hasn’t seen him in over a year. He opens a portal for her and she walks out onto the Waverider looking very pregnant. Mick ain’t happy about that and an argument starts, but Sara has assigned Aunt Ava to referee the family reunion.

The ground team ends up outside a studio taping Behrad’s favorite sitcom, Bud Stuy. He assumes the Legends just pretended to forget his birthday and faked a mission as an elaborate setup to surprise him with tickets to a taping. Everyone goes along with this rather than admitting that as time travelers, they have no concept of time. Sort of like working weekends.

Behrad explains that Bud Stuy was important to his formative years. It was canceled after two seasons, but watching the reruns left an impression on him. He says the show’s charm was that it wasn’t trying to appeal to everyone. Yeah, I get that. I’ve latched onto a very niche show within an already niche genre about superheroes traveling through time, and it takes itself just as seriously as it needs to.

If I’m being honest, I also would have latched onto this show. It has a very early WB-era sitcom vibe to it.

Sara and Spooner go out to intercept the pod, but Spooner shoots it and knocks it off course, sending it crashing into the set of Bud Stuy in the middle of the taping. The rest of the live audience thinks the baby alien who emerges is part of the show, and the director rolls with it. Since the audience loved the alien, Kamran Saeed (the director) decides to add the alien to the show. The main star of the show, Kamran’s brother Imran, is reluctant.

Lita is still going to school and is living with Nico (the baby’s father), but has no plans to get married. Mick grumbles some more, but finally calms down and asks Lita to tell him all about Nico.

Zari asks Nate how the other Zari is doing. Zari 1.0 has mainly been asking about Behrad, wanting updates on her little brother. It also seems that along with Gideon, she was one of the few people to remember Behrad’s birthday. Behrad and Astra infiltrate the writers’ room to ask about the alien, but only overhear absurd ideas for how to fit the alien into the show.

CAITY: “Any luck?”
SHAYAN: “Negative. But I did get a peek behind the curtain in the writers’ room. Trust me, you do not wanna know how the sausage gets made.”

…Wait, sorry; that should say “Sara” and “Behrad.” For some reason I confused that with behind-the-scenes chatter that somehow made it into the episode. Anyway, the Legends eventually locate the baby alien on the craft services table, but when they try to grab it, it shrieks so loud it temporarily deafens them, allowing Kamran to take the baby alien away.

Oh great, now The CW is going to start selling Baby Alien Bananas for $50 a bunch.

The next day, changes to Behrad’s appearance and personality indicate that his personal timeline has changed, and that means the Legends have to sort things out before the timeline catches up to them. Gary identifies the alien as a Gusarax, and Behrad coins the name “Gus-Gus.” The way to get Gus-Gus back to the ship without making him cry is to get him to bond with one of the Legends the way he bonded with Kamran. Since the show is casting a new “nosy landlord” character, Zari goes in to audition, but loses out to Nate.

ZARI: “Finally, a win for straight white men.”

See? This is another reason why I love Legends. They can get away with a sarcastic joke like that because the show is low-profile enough that the guys making ten videos a week about “SJWs ruining entertainment” don’t even know the show or that line exist.

Behrad tries talking to Imran directly. He tells the actor what Bud Stuy meant to him.

BEHRAD: “Growing up, my mom and dad looked at me and saw a future business school graduate. The world saw a weird Muslim kid they couldn’t bother to figure out. But seeing you on TV, Imran, was the first time I saw me.”

DO I NEED TO TAP THE SIGN AGAIN? This really hits on a lot of the same points as Season Two’s “Raiders of the Lost Art,” and I’d like to touch on something I said in that review. Art doesn’t just inspire more art; it can inspire advances in technology and medicine, or inspire someone to do other good in the world. But it can also inspire us to become who we truly are. Behrad saw a guy on TV who wasn’t conforming to societal expectations and that took a lot of pressure off of him. The characters and stories we watch or read about don’t have to be heroic or idealized – sometimes they can just be a reflection of who we are.

I hope there are young people who see themselves in Behrad Tarazi.

Imran tries talking to his brother again, but Kamran isn’t budging on the alien. Imran quits, resulting in Behrad becoming Business Behrad. He sabotages the meeting that Zari and Astra arrange with Kamran to talk about future merchandising. The totems disappear from Zari’s and Behrad’s wrists because in the timeline that’s taking over, Behrad never stole the totem. Zari blames herself for not knowing her brother as well as she thinks she should.

Sara sees the obvious signs that Mick is going to try to kill Lita’s boyfriend, so Sara, Gary, and Lita go out to find Mick before he can kill Nico. Mick didn’t kill him, though – they sat down and talked it out. Mick wants his grandchild to have something he didn’t: two loving parents. Also, in the conversation that ensues, everyone learns that Mick slept with Kayla, something that greatly concerns Gary. Mick starts crying and walks off.

Zari talks to Kamran and tries to convince him to talk to Imran, but he’s busy filming the newest episode “First Contact High.” Five bucks says the Legends writers wanted to use that name for this episode but the network said no.

Astra tries to get Imran to come back by chasing him down in a high-speed cart race around the studio. Nate improvises during filming and pretends to be a government agent looking for the baby alien. Imran crashes into the set and Gus-Gus goes flying into Nate’s arms. To prevent the baby from crying, Nate gives him one of the prop pot gummies…at least I think it’s a prop. Imran said something about his stash getting mixed up with the prop stash before. Imran sends Nate and Gus-Gus on their way.

The audience just rolls with the improv. Imran and Kamran make up, and the Legends throw a birthday party for Behrad, who has returned to his normal self. Zari 2.0 is in the totem talking to Zari 1.0 about their brother. She tells 1.0 that she should join the birthday party. 2.0 had a talk with the ancestors, and because there are two air totems now, Behrad and the timeline should be okay as long as at least one Zari is in the totem at a time. They’re going to try switching out for a few weeks so 1.0 can see her brother on a regular basis.

If this becomes the new thing, I might have to start calling 2.0 “Zari” and 1.0 “Z” because I already confused the numbers like three times writing that last paragraph. Z joins the party, catching up on everything and even making the ship name for Sara and Ava (Avalance) canon. Gary stops Mick from drinking – Kayla laid eggs in Mick’s head and now he’s pregnant. Cue the laugh track! …Oh, that’s just Gideon using her programmed laughter.

Dang, Gideon, that’s cold.

I went into the representation stuff earlier, so I won’t do that again, but it was really cool to see a bit of what made Behrad who he is. I compared the episode to “Raiders of the Lost Art” earlier, but there’s also a bit of “Phone Home”, where we saw everything that made Ray the optimistic goober that he was. From the moment Imran walks onto the set at the first taping, it’s clear how similar Behrad is to him.

Now, I’ve already mentioned two episodes that this one is similar to, so some might read that as this being just a retread of old ideas, but “This is Gus” works on a different level while still touching on similar themes.

I didn’t touch on the conversation between Zari and Kamran because I wanted to discuss it here. Zari understands Kamran’s desire to make a hit because “our hard work is rarely celebrated.” Kamran counters that the original format of the show wasn’t exactly something they could be proud of. Zari says Imran “doesn’t have to be a torch-bearer for all of us. That expectation is, honestly, unrealistic and frankly, annoying.”

I may not understand that point of view from a Muslim perspective, but it sounds an awful lot like what I’ve observed in expectations for LGBTQIA+ media. There’s such a dearth of proper representation that when it does come up, there’s a lot of pressure put on the thing to get it right. That lack of representation puts far too much pressure on niche representation, and minority representation in media isn’t given the second chances that the status quo is.

I was so disheartened by LGBTQIA+ people turning their backs on Batwoman without even giving it a chance, just because it wasn’t perfect. I was disheartened because if it failed, it wasn’t going to get a second chance. When you fail at adapting Spider-Man, Batman, or Superman five times in a row, you get five more chances. If you fail at adapting Batwoman once, you’re told that lesbian superheroes don’t sell. And I think that’s what Zari and Kamran were getting at. If Kamran didn’t produce an instant hit, he wasn’t going to get a second chance.

And how fucked up is that?

Next time: Constantine is back and in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, and Mick is dealing with pregnancy symptoms. Speaking of niche shows, am I right?

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Legends of Tomorrow airs Sundays on the CW at 8 ET/7 CT. Kate grew up with shows like Family Ties and My Two Dads, the latter of which wasn’t about a gay couple but rather two dudes who spent three seasons not taking a paternity test. Kate mostly just wanted their sweet car-shaped chair. See how car-shaped chairs have influenced her personality on Twitter @WearyKatie.

You wouldn’t ordinarily associate the phrase “feel-good hit of the summer” to a video game, but if anything deserves the attribution, it’s Power Wash Simulator.

Developed by FuturLab and published by Square Enix, Power Wash Simulator is exactly what it says on the tin. There are three types of gameplay: Career Mode, where you can earn money for upgrades and unlock successive places and vehicles to clean; Free Play, which lets you enjoy any previously completed job; and Specials, which at the moment consists only of cleaning the Mars Rover, but is planned to be a collection of cool and off-beat things to hose down.

As you progress through Career Mode, you earn money to upgrade your washer or buy a new one. There are short and long extensions, along with different nozzles, as well as surface-specific soaps that will clean a large area extremely quickly, but run out fast and cost money to refill. (Note that in Free Play, you can use the soap indefinitely without it running out, which is a small godsend.) I highly recommend buying the short extension and the turbo and soap nozzles for your washer as soon as you can afford them. The turbo nozzle is a high-pressure spiraling stream with a fairly long range that will really help with all the nooks and crannies you’ll miss.

The trick is to go slowly. There’s no time limit, and just like with a real water spray, you’re not going to make any progress if you just whip it over the dirt as fast as possible. You can cover a greater area with a wider nozzle, but at the expense of pressure. Higher pressures are necessary to remove some of the really caked-on filth, like graffiti or mold. For things like rust, the various soaps are the only things that will remove it.

The water physics in this game are remarkable. You can definitely feel the difference between the different pressure settings, and the spray bounces off of different materials and different angles exactly how you’d expect real water to react. I even managed to make a rainbow once or twice when I caught the sunlight just right. There aren’t any dripping effects, but that was probably a deliberate choice during development because I can see that getting too messy too quickly.

One of the few problems I can see is that this is not going to be very accessible for visually impaired or colorblind gamers. The Tab key will highlight the little spots you missed in a brief flash of bright orange, but it’s not very helpful against colors that run across the red-orange-yellow spectrum, and there’s no way to make it persist beyond that brief flash. I’ve found myself repeatedly tapping Tab just to keep that 1% of hidden dirt blinking. There’s no zoom feature – you have to physically get close enough to the dirt for the spray to eliminate it. It’s also occasionally hard to discern the difference between dirt and shadows, and no, I will not tell you how many times I tried to pressure-wash a shadow, because a gamer of my caliber would never.

With all that said and done, Power Wash Simulator is one of my favorite new obsessions and I haven’t been able to put it down. It’s so soothing and relaxing. Pop on your soundtrack of choice, adjust your nozzle, and enjoy a beautiful day making messy things look clean.

Power Wash Simulator is available on Steam. Visit the game’s website here. Dayna can be found on Twitter @queenanthai.

The Kane sisters deserved better.

SPOILER WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT 

Black Mask is broadcasting on every channel in Gotham. “Blah blah blah, city corrupt, I’m the only one who can save it through total anarchy.” He’s dropped off bins of skull masks around the city and he’s encouraging lawlessness to bring down the terrible institutions of Blackgate Prison, Arkham Asylum, Batwoman, and the GCPD. Dude, you fund the GCPD. Shut the fuck up. Anyway, he cuts the power to the city and the Purge gets underway.

Luke looks through the video on his laptop for any hint of where Black Mask was broadcasting from. Mary makes a list of all of the things they need to do to save the city. Ryan’s like “Yeah, but how?” I know you don’t have Bat-gadgets or a suit, but you have the Batmobile…because Circe didn’t take that for some reason. Luke gives them walkie-talkies to keep in touch as Mary goes to the clinic to prepare for a long night. Ryan looks at the video Luke is watching and spots a TV station logo in the reflection on Black Mask’s mask.

Side note: Luke complains that his product placement laptop is at 5% battery, which I’m amazed wasn’t a conversation between the producers and the advertisers. Like “No no, he should be able to use that thing the whole episode.” “Oh, does the battery last that long?” “…No, but we want your viewers to think it does.”

As Black Mask sets Tavaroff up with a Venom injector and aerosolized Snakebite to counteract the mental effects, Circe asks what his master plan is. By morning, he expects the GCPD will have collapsed under the weight of its own corruption (good luck, been waiting over a century for that to happen IRL), the mayor to be dead from the Purge, and Gotham to be waiting for a hero. Then Roman Sionis will swoop in and kill whichever False Face goon he convinces to wear his mask for a bit. Roman Sionis will be a hero in charge of Gotham.

Yeah, but you’ll have just proven how vulnerable power structures are and you’ll be sitting at the top of a system you weakened to get there. You’ll be overthrown inside of a week. Before Black Mask can see the holes in his plan, Tavaroff flatlines, so he has him thrown out back.

In case you were wondering, this is still creepy as fuck.

Luke figures out what TV studio Black Mask is in. Sophie wants to go with Ryan, but Ryan isn’t sure she can take down Circe since she’s “just Ryan Wilder.” Sophie believes in Ryan Wilder, though, which is a far cry from their relationship at the start of the season. Character growth! Speaking of, oh, hey Alice. She’s looking for Kate, even though she knows Circe’s the dominant persona right now. Also, she left Safyiah in a car in a scrapyard. That won’t come back to bite anyone, I’m sure.

The riot is heating up outside. Ryan and Sophie find the mayor in an SUV outside. He’s in bad shape, so Ryan has Sophie stay with him while she and Alice head to the TV studio while wearing masks. Ryan has to talk Alice into it. This bothers me because of what’s coming later.

Luke is searching the Bat-cave for anything that can help and finds some old drawings he made as a kid of a Black Batman. One of the drawings has tech notes from his father on it. He continues searching and finds a high-tech Bat-suit under a sheet, based on the drawings he made as a child. I love the music in this scene, and I wonder if it’s something that’s going to be used as his leitmotif. Or it could be regular music from the show that I’m just not recognizing at the moment. BUT Y’ALL, BATWING!!!

BATWING, Y’ALL!

Tavaroff is found and wheeled into Mary’s clinic. She realizes that aerosolizing Snakebite weakens its hit and prolongs the memories, so she starts to formulate a plan. She grabs the tank and runs outside to call Luke. She thinks this version of Snakebite can be used to bring Kate back for good. Well, I suppose Snakebite vape is better than rattling off every word and phrase in the English language until they hit whatever Kate’s trigger words are. Just then, Tavaroff breaks out of the clinic, looking for his Snakebite.

Alice and Ryan talk on the way to the studio. Ryan thinks it’s ridiculous that she’s served more time than Alice, but Alice says she’s serving time in her own way. Yeah, because Beth was imprisoned for years by both August and Safiyah, and then had her humanity locked away after that, only for it to resurface after she’s committed horrible crimes that she’ll be forever judged for–oh wait, she’s talking about Safiyah killing Ocean. Fucking hell.

Alice gets why Ryan hates her now, and she’s sorry for killing her mother. Ryan doesn’t forgive her, which is 100% valid – forgiveness is never something that’s owed, even in cases of atonement…which doesn’t apply here because Alice hasn’t exactly atoned for anything yet. But because of Alice’s psychology, which I’ve touched on before, when Ryan dismisses her attempt at an apology and humanity, Alice feels vulnerable and rejected so she dives right into being a cruel monster again. She says Ryan killed her own biological mother who died in childbirth, which….fuck you, Alice. She gets a well-deserved slap for that. Ryan intends to lock her in Arkham when this is over.

They go inside the studio where they find the villain trophies and Circe. Circe is decked out in a torn-up and modified Bat-suit that resembles combat gear. The brief scuffle is interrupted by Black Mask joining the fray with dual-wielded handguns. Circe escapes with the villain trophies, forcing Ryan and Alice to split up. Alice stays behind to deal with Black Mask, and Ryan goes after Circe with Alice pleading for her to “save my sister.”

I’d go into how relatable Ryan’s impostor syndrome is, but nobody would want to read what I have to say about something like that.

Mary runs from Tavaroff, heading up a fire escape. At the top, he pushes her off but Batwing flies up and catches her in mid-air. Once Mary is safe, she drives the Batmobile to Ryan, giving her the Snakebite to use against Circe. Batwing knocks Tavaroff out, getting some really cathartic justice.

Black Mask is beating the shit out of Alice. He monologues about how she was a terrible villain because she had conflicting goals: She wanted to protect her sister, but also kill her. Alice says “You know who was a great villain? The Joker!” Hard disagree, but it’s just pretense to spray Black Mask’s face with the Joker’s acid flower before cramming Roman’s skull mask back on, fusing it to his face.

Circe is on the Bat-bike, so it’s high-tech toys vs. high-tech toys…which include missiles. The Bat-Team’s definition of “nonlethal” is very different from mine. Ryan finally stops Circe on a goddamn bridge and I already see where this is going. They fight, and things are pretty evenly matched until Alice shows up. Ryan tells her to use the Snakebite on Circe, which Alice does, getting caught up in the gas cloud as she tackles Circe off the bridge into the water below.

The villain trophies that were in Circe’s bag float free in the river. Alice and Circe are underwater experiencing separate hallucinations. Alice sees Ocean in their hideout. He encourages her to find love again and she finally gets a chance to say goodbye. “Circe” hallucinates young Kate Kane going to the Cartwright basement, only this time she opens the door and rescues Beth. In the real world, Alice wakes up and drags Kate to shore. Kate isn’t breathing, so Ryan starts CPR with Alice’s help. Ryan does the chest compressions while talking Alice through giving Kate mouth-to-mouth. This is such a good scene. Whether Ryan intended it or not, it’s so important that Alice/Beth is helping to save her sister.

In this moment, she’s Beth Kane. Beth is fighting to save her sister. And then it all comes crashing down.

Alice – no, Beth – sobs and begs her sister to live. Eventually, Kate coughs up the water and starts breathing. She sees Beth and calls her by name. Just then, cops surround them and drag a kicking and screaming Alice away. Hey, Ryan? Why are you letting this happen? You know the GCPD is crooked to the core, even when it’s not bought and paid for by Black Mask. Much as I love the scene of Beth and Ryan working together to save Kate, I fucking hate the final outcome. I’m going to have more to say on it at the end because it gets so much worse.

Ryan goes to a parole board hearing, where she’s asked if she’s changed. She gives a great speech about how she’s still the good person she was when she was wrongly arrested. The shitty system doesn’t care whether you were wrongly arrested or not, sadly. But she has changed. She’s found her power and she’s doing so much more good now. She’s released from restrictions and taken off parole.

At Wayne Tower, Mary and Luke catch Kate up on what she’s missed. They ask Luke about the Batwing suit. Apparently Lucius turned Luke’s childhood drawings of a Black Batman into reality. I like that so much better than what I was originally thinking – that it was just a high-tech Bat-suit concept like the Batman Beyond suit. They ask Kate about Alice.

KATE: “You know, I spent so long thinking that it was up to me to bring Beth out of Alice. Turns out, Alice brought Kate out of me. She’s my twin. She’ll always be a part of me, but until Alice wants to be Beth, I can’t help her.”

I get it. I get the sentiment they’re going for. Beth has to want to change. That’s fine, that’s super, that’s great. But she’s only been capable of changing since her memories and humanity were restored. I feel like everyone’s giving up on Beth because this show realizes that Alice is the best villain the Arrowverse has ever had, and they desperately need her to be bad because it’s less effort than writing and casting another great villain.

Anyway, Ryan arrives, so Kate ushers Luke and Mary out of the room so they can have a little talk, bat to bat. Ryan thanks Kate for her wearing the symbol and changing her life. Kate says Ryan knows what Batwoman means for the people who need her, and Batwoman is Ryan’s now.

Even with Kate being a different actor, it’s still great seeing Kate and Ryan in the same room together.

Later, Kate goes to the Hold Up to talk to Sophie. Sophie picks up on what I figured out before we even knew if Kate was ever coming back: Kate isn’t staying in Gotham. She’s heading to Metropolis to see Jacob, then Kara in National City, and then she’s going to try to find Bruce. Sophie asks the million dollar question: why Bruce?

KATE: “My sister spent eleven years waiting for me to find her and I didn’t. If Bruce is alive and trapped somewhere, maybe finding him is the only way for me to forgive myself for not finding Beth.”

There are isn’t a font out there that would adequately convey the deep, exasperated sigh I made watching this. I get that they don’t want Wallis Day as a regular because they don’t know what to do with her. I just found out this week they let Dougray Scott (Jacob Kane) go from the show because they didn’t know what to do with him either. And hey, having her to go find Bruce is as good as anything – I even floated that possibility months ago when speculating about how they would write Kate off. But that excuse is infuriating because she’s just letting Beth rot in another cell while she skips off to ease her conscience by finding Bruce.

Not that she ever will. The show obviously has no intention of ever resolving the mystery of what happened to Bruce Wayne, and with only one person left on the show with any connection to Bruce – Luke – they really have no reason to. They’re not sending Kate on a quest; they’re exiling her to obscurity.

I’m too pissed to describe the rest of this scene. Boo-hoo, they’re still in love but can’t be together. They kiss goodbye.

You can’t win me over with Sapphic love, Batwoman. I’m still mad. …I didn’t say stop.

The Batwoman suit is restored and the Bat-gadgets are returned to the cave, but the villain trophies are still missing. Ryan goes to Arkham to see Alice, who’s in a cell next to Black Mask. Ryan says she just wanted the system to work the way it’s supposed to for once. By locking people who need mental healthcare in a corrupt and abusive asylum with no rehabilitation program? Ryan, you even admit the guards are so corrupt that it only took you $40 to bribe them into letting you see Beth. Come on, you know this isn’t the system “working like it should”; it’s just convenient for you because the boss of your mom’s killers is on the receiving end of that corrupt system.

ARGH!

Almost done.

Of course, feeling vulnerable and treated like a monster, the monster resurfaces inside of Beth and she taunts Ryan with the knowledge that her biological mother is still alive.

On the river, we see the villain trophies floating away: Penguin’s umbrella, Mad Hatter’s hat, and Poison Ivy’s vine, broken free from its glass case and growing along the bank.

Hey Pam, you might want to come out of retirement to check on this plant.

Okay, if it wasn’t obvious from certain parts of the recap, I’m not happy with this finale, and it has nothing to do with the cowl being passed to Ryan permanently. Ryan has made the Batwoman identity and the show her own. It would have annoyed me more if they had brought Kate back to take over again. Also, Ryan is a very important character in terms of representation – do I need to tap the sign again?

No, the problems with this episode are twofold. The finale is rushed. Black Mask is defeated unceremoniously, Tavaroff is knocked out in one hit, the corruption of the GCPD is never addressed and we have no idea if any arrests were made. The only people confirmed locked away are Black Mask and Alice. I really think this should have been two or three episodes for everything they were building up prior to the finale. They were trying to hurry things along so they could get to their wrap-up and the teasers for next season.

Which leads me to my primary complaint: Beth and Kate deserve better than this. They were the emotional core of the first season and they deserve a better resolution than what they got. Kate is running off to find Bruce, who until now seemed like he left of his own volition, but is now implied to maybe be held against his will somewhere. I know the door is open for Kate to come back, but this really feels like the sort of exit they give characters on The Flash when they don’t know what to do with them anymore. Maybe Kate will run into Wally and Julian while she’s out there. The former main character of the show deserves a better sendoff than some vague forever quest.

I think what really pisses me off is what they’ve done to Beth. I don’t think the writing team really had a plan for what to do with her at the end of the season, and because Rachael Skarsten is contracted for more seasons, they couldn’t write her off the show. But they can’t give her a redemption arc because her redemption doesn’t mean anything to the existing main characters. Everyone hates her. No one has any vested interest in seeing her rehabilitated. In fact, Ryan actively wants her to rot in a hole for the rest of her life, never to be seen again. All because they had to make Alice someone to Ryan, and the easy thing to do was to make her responsible for her mom’s death. But now they’ve completely written themselves into a corner because even though they gave that bullshit excuse about how “Alice has to want to be Beth,” there has to be another main character who wants her to be Beth too, or else there’s no reason for her to be Beth and every reason for her to be Alice.

How would I have done things differently? Have Kate help Beth. Give that whole plot a happy resolution. Have her take Beth somewhere to get her real help, far the fuck away from the Supervillain Summer Camp that is Arkham Asylum. Have them go on a road trip together, maybe even to find Bruce. Anything but having Kate abandon her to a system that won’t help her even if she wants to be helped. Or at the very least, give us a scene of Kate visiting Beth in Arkham instead of Ryan waltzing in there to spike the football.

While I’m at it? Ryan deserves better, too. The show has spent most of this season shining a spotlight on and examining systems of abuse and corruption at every level. And the way it ends is by having the hero of our story watching a mentally ill woman being dragged off by murderous cops and gloating over having locked her away in a famously abusive asylum. As someone from a system of abuse and neglect, Ryan wouldn’t delight in someone else being thrown into one, not even the woman responsible for her mother’s death.

This whole finale left a sour taste in my mouth. I can’t even muster enough excitement about possible villains next season, and I love Poison Ivy. Also, wow, cutting right from “your mom is still alive” to a Poison Ivy cliffhanger did sort of make it seem like Ryan’s mom is Poison Ivy. Maybe it’s just a weird cut in an already badly stitched-together episode.

Hey, some good though! Luke is Batwing! A great next step for an awesome character. And we’re keeping Ryan as Batwoman! For the most part, she’s been amazing this season, and I can’t wait to see what she does in Season Three.

If this review goes live without a stinger image, it’s because I was too irritated by this episode to focus on finding anything funny. I’m going to step away after writing this to cool down. I haven’t been this heated since “Do Not Resuscitate.”

Fuck’s sake, we didn’t even get a satisfying death for Safiyah. She’s just stabbed with the +2 Dagger of Healing and maybe rotting in a car off screen?

See you next season, apparently different Bat-day but same Bat-channel.

PREVIOUS 

Batwoman airs Sunday nights at 9 Eastern/8 Central on The CW. Kate Danvers is relieved that Kate Kane is leaving the show because now she can write these footers without needing her last name in them. Kate Danvers still has to refer to herself in the third person though, which she finds concerning. She can be reached on Twitter @WearyKatie.

Yee – and I can’t stress this enough – haw.

SPOILER WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT

The Legends help Ava prepare a breakfast for Sara and a thank-you meal for Mick. Everyone pitches in, giving us a cute family scene. Ava serves Sara breakfast in bed, but Sara doesn’t have much of an appetite, so Ava catches her up on what she missed until Sara blurts out that she’s an alien/human hybrid clone. She couldn’t even make it through the cold open. At least Ava’s initial reaction is to snort and say “What?”

Gary and Spooner hook a tracking gizmo from Kayla’s ship up to the Waverider so they can locate the remaining alien pods. Constantine asks Gary about the Fountain of Imperium, but Gary claims he’s never heard of it.

Ava isn’t phased by her fiancée being an alien hybrid clone because Sara is still Sara. Gideon informs the captains that a pod has been located. Sara wants to keep the “alien hybrid” thing from the others for the duration of the mission, just so she has one normal mission back.

The pod is in the Oklahoma territory, 1891, in a town called Fist City. What a coincidence; Sara was about to take Ava there before Gideon called. Ava tells Nate that Sara needs a nice smooth mission, which Nate interprets as a “classic Legends romp.” Uh, guys? I think Nate might have been replaced by a shapeshifting alien, because a guy who’s been here since Season Two should not think a “smooth mission” is standard operating procedure for the Legends.

Also, confirmed that this is indeed Sara Lance because she’s doing the awkward finger guns as she’s leaving for the mission.

There’s tension in the air. Spooner and Astra aren’t getting along, and Zari tries to give Behrad love advice when she notices him flirting with Astra. They enter the saloon of the supposedly violent and lawless town, but find everyone being cheerful and hospitable. There are rules on the wall against swearing, gambling, fornicating, and alcohol. There’s even a singing cowboy to serenade the Legends and welcome them to “Fist City, the Gladdest Place on Earth.”

Constantine shows Gary a reference to the Fountain of Imperium and tells him he’s lost his magic. Gary recognizes the Fountain now, but says it’s just a myth. As Constantine walks away unconvinced, Gary looks worried.

Meanwhile in Fist City (just around the corner from Peg Town), the Legends start to investigate why the town has suddenly become a Disneyfied version of the Old West. Astra tries to play poker against a guy with a bag of gold, but he’s playing Go Fish and gambling is against the rules. Behrad catches the attention of a woman named Irma Rose. Nate finds a wanted poster for Deputy Marshal Bass Reeves and learns that the sheriff of the town is an outlaw by the name of Levi Stapleton.

On cue, Stapleton walks into the saloon to welcome the strangers to the town. He’s played by actor Nic Bishop, who played General Killtacular (Kilgore) in “Bay of Squids,” which is a little weird. Then again, they reuse another actor in this episode. Stapleton politely suggests the Legends enjoy the hospitality and then leave town.

Outside, Astra asks the card player where he got his gold. Tempers flare and the ground starts to shake, drawing everyone outside. A massive alien worm burrows out of the ground and swallows the card player whole. Stapleton then calls the alien off with a whistle tied around his neck, then tells the Legends to leave and not return.

“I feel I was denied critical need-to-know information!”

The Legends turn to Gary for info. He says the alien is probably a Haverack – an alien drawn to the chemicals released when people are angry. The only way to tame it is with the whistle that was loaded with the pod. Spooner and Astra – the team rageaholics – are benched while the others go to a square-dancing competition to get the whistle away from Stapleton.

During the dance, tensions between the Legends start to rise. Ava is concerned about Sara’s sudden appetite for milkshakes and cherries. Constantine thinks Gary is lying to him about the Fountain, and Zari is being nosy about Behrad’s love life. Zari tries to nab the whistle, but is stopped by Stapleton, who is wise to the Legends’ plan. Constantine gets angry, but Sara cools things down by challenging Stapleton to a duel.

Astra goes looking for the gold and Spooner follows her. They start out arguing, but bond over dead moms and tough lives. They find the alien’s burrow and notice that it um…poops gold. They also find Deputy Marshal Bass Reeves, played by David Ramsey – actor for John Diggle and the director of this episode. Reeves tells them that the gold made Fist City a boom town.

After being serenaded by the singing cowboy narrator, Sara faces off against Stapleton in a duel. Stapleton turns and fires early, putting a shot clean through Sara’s head. She falls to her knees, but the wound heals, so she gets back up and begins walking toward Stapleton as he fires five more shots at her to no effect. She shoots the whistle out of his hand before his anger attracts the Haverack, which kills him.

“I am completely out of ammo…that’s never happened to me before.”

Irma picks up the whistle and calls off the alien, but she and the other citizens of Fist City aren’t giving up the whistle or the alien. A shootout starts and the Legends are forced to retreat to the saloon, where Sara tells the others she’s half-alien. Nate welcomes her to the bulletproof club, so he’s completely unfazed.

The earlier tensions continue to boil over with the occasional rumble from the alien worm. Gary finally tells Constantine about the Fountain. Finding it is extremely dangerous, and there’s a map, and the aliens know that map is of Earth. As the arguing continues, Nate tries to calm everyone down, but he’s tired of being the peacekeeper and starts to lose it himself. He starts formulating a plan that consists of just venting all his frustration.

Nate complains that when Sara was kidnapped and Mick left to save her, Nate was the most tenured Legend on the ship but nobody asked how he was doing. He used to have Zari to talk to, but she’s gone, though he assures Zari 2.0 there’s no offense intended. Out of everyone on the ship, he’s the only one who changes the cartridges in the fabricator. Someone changes the thermostat every night. And he tried to get a seat at the Hall of Justice, but got no response. His rant is great. He walks out onto the street to draw the worm away from the Legends, then steels up and prepares to get eaten.

Spooner, Astra, and Reeves arrive. Spooner doesn’t want the Haverack inside her head, so Astra tells her to reverse the empathic connection and make the alien feel what’s in her head. This causes the Haverack to momentarily freeze. Astra chants a spell that explodes the alien.

“A few household chemicals in the proper proportions.”

Without the worm and Stapleton, the town goes back to normal. The cowboy narrator takes us room to room and scene to scene for the denouement. Gary tells Constantine that Crowley is his best bet to find the fountain, so Constantine leaves the ship to get his magic back after saying goodbye to Zari. Ava and Sara realize they were trying too hard to pretend like everything’s normal, and accept that their lives just aren’t normal.

Behrad checks on Zari to see how she is after Constantine left. She apologizes for being overbearing, saying she was just looking out for her little brother. Behrad has an idea of how they can both help Nate and borrows Zari’s totem. He gives both totems to Nate so he can use them to visit Zari 1.0. As the song finishes with the lesson “There might not be a normal, but that might be okay,” an exasperated Ava says they can’t keep the cowboy narrator, so Nate and Behrad drag him off.

“Happy trails, Legends.”

I love this dumb show. I’ve often said that I really love the Old West episodes, and there are a few reasons why. Not only was the giant Beebo in an Old West episode, but I just genuinely love the aesthetic and the dumb tropes of westerns. Legends also heavily leans into that with duels, saloons, Wilhelm screams, brawls, piano music, and now a singing cowboy. While Dayna and I were watching the episode together, I told her that the singing cowboy was bringing me so much joy. Then that ending left me cackling.

Also, yeah, looks like the aliens are still going to be a threat, but the Fountain of Imperium is probably going to be this season’s Spear of Destiny or Loom of Fate.

Next time: Did you know there’s a wiki dedicated to the show ALF? Did you know that it greatly chronicles and details the series and all of its spinoffs? Anyway, the next episode is an ALF spoof.

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Legends of Tomorrow airs Sundays on the CW at 8 ET/7 CT. Give Kate a break; she can barely compose tweets, let alone music. Find her on Twitter @WearyKatie.

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.

Oh. That’s really not 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.”

Say whatever you want, Mick – I can tell you’re hugging her back.

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!”

Someone gave this man access to a time machine and I am forever grateful to them.

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.

Get it? He’s from an alterNATE timeline! Look, I’m just phoning it in here because the end of the episode broke me.

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.

For crying out loud, he said the word “please.” If that’s not character growth, I don’t know what is.

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!!!

Y’ALL DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW HAPPY THIS MADE MY LITTLE GAY HEART. THAT IS ME EXPLODING IN THE BACKGROUND.

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.

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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.

In which I become increasingly frustrated by a villain not dying.

SPOILER WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT

Batwoman beats up some False Face guys and interrogates one for information about Kate and Black Mask. I say “interrogate,” but she actually tortures him by spraying Janus perfume in his eyes. Black Mask has gone underground and there’s no sign of Kate/Circe. Back at the Batcave, Mary gets a text that a drunk patron of the Hold Up is acting like she owns the place. Turns out she does!

Ryan and Mary drag Kate up to the loft to sleep it off. Mary provides her with a big glass of water on the nightstand and a puke bucket in close proximity before tilting Kate’s her head to the side. The way Mary goes over this like a checklist tells me she’s done this for friends before, but she’s probably done it specifically for her sister. Kate remembers Mary by name, but has a little trouble remembering how she knows her. Hey, show? Stop breaking Mary’s heart for like five minutes, okay?

Oh, we’re going to break Alice’s heart instead?

Mary goes to Alice’s hideout and finds her crying over Ocean’s body. Alice begs and then threatens Mary to make her “fix him.” He’s been dead for hours at this point, so there’s nothing Mary can do. She actually empathizes with Alice in the moment. She knows the pain of losing someone because of Alice, but she wouldn’t wish that pain on anyone. She can’t bring herself to ask for Alice’s help again, whether out of fear or just giving Alice space to grieve. She thanks Alice for saving Kate and leaves.

Luke gets Kate’s journals from the Batcave to help jog her memory. Ryan is worried that she needs more than just a memory jog because of all the pain and trauma she went through. Luke thinks Kate is strong enough to overcome it.

He’s so happy in this scene. This team needs a big win.

Luke gives Kate the journals along with the keys to her motorcycle to go for a little joyride. She goes to a seemingly abandoned building where she meets up with Roman Sionis. Turns out she’s still Circe, and despite the tension of the end of the previous episode, she, Roman, and Safiyah are all chummy. She presents them with the journals as a “manual to the Batcave.”

Ryan feels like her days on the Bat-Team are numbered, so she packs up her stuff to move back into her van. Sophie offers up her couch instead, but Ryan declines. Sophie also tells Ryan she doesn’t have to give up the suit – she’s made it her own and proven herself to everyone. I agree. Ryan says there’s one person she hasn’t proven herself to, and that’s Kate. She also doubts what she’s done for the city since Black Mask is still at large.

Black Mask, meanwhile, is recruiting former Crows to be part of his gang. Tavaroff is there too, but he doesn’t want to only be a cog in the machine. Black Mask offers him something more.

Ryan steals a laptop from a False Face accountant. She takes it back to her van to check the money trail, but GCPD suddenly surround the van and arrest her for stolen property (the laptop), and for drug possession (Snakebite injectors that they planted). I just want to make it clear that cops do not have to be on a supervillain’s payroll to do shit like this. I mean, unless you consider Republicans supervillains. Okay, I amend my previous statement to fictional supervillains.

The most unrealistic thing about this scenario is that she’s on her feet and not either brutally beaten, tasered, or shot. ACAB.

In the GCPD parking garage, Ryan is left alone in the cruiser until Roman gets in to talk to her and makes it clear he knows she’s Batwoman. He claims he’s trying to bring justice to the city by wearing a mask, like her. Ryan says she fights for those the system overlooks – people like the real Circe Sionis, whose assault was covered up before she was imprisoned for doing something about it. She says Roman is dishonoring her memory. Roman ends the conversation there, but not before telling Ryan she’ll be killed before she makes it to a judge.

The rest of the Bat-Team finds out about Ryan’s arrest and starts to plan how they’re going to bust her out. The obvious answer is to send Kate in as Batwoman. Once they give her the suit, Circe shoots Mary, Luke, and Sophie with a tranquilizer gun, locks them in the elevator, and starts looking around the Bat-cave. Credit where it’s due: This isn’t a terrible plan for a villain. It hinges on Kate not breaking through, but the Bat-Team just handed over the suit and keys to everything.

At the courthouse, Ryan’s parole officer, Susan, gives her shit about the arrest. She doubts Ryan’s story about the drug paraphernalia being planted, because Susan is white and the system seems perfectly fine to her. Ryan tells her the GCPD is corrupt and that Black Mask owns them. When that doesn’t work, she tells Susan she’s Batwoman. Susan doesn’t believe her, but Ryan points to the six armed SWAT officers who arrested her and the guards outside with a ridiculous amount of firepower, all for a baggie of Snakebite injectors.

That’s not because you’re Batwoman; that’s because the police are grossly over-funded.

As Ryan is about to be taken away to mysteriously die in custody, Susan tells the officers she needs to speak with the judge because Ryan is being railroaded. One of the cops pulls out the patented law enforcement quick-fix-for-all-problems device (a.k.a. a gun) and tries to shoot Susan. Ryan stops him and beats him up, along with the other crooked officers. Susan offers Ryan a pass to get into the parking garage so she can escape. Oh, that’s right; she’s kind of a Batwoman fangirl.

I could watch Ryan beating up rooms full of dudes all day long.

Alice spreads Ocean’s ashes on the river and Safiyah arrives to “pay her respects.” Ah, a perfect opportunity to kill Safiyah. Alice, would you like to kill Safiyah? There she is. Safiyah says they’re even – Alice took the thing Safiyah loved most (the Desert Rose), so she took what Alice loved most. Uh-huh. Please kill her, Alice. Safiyah offers to end the war between them right there, and says she’ll give Alice sanctuary on Coryana from the chaos that’s coming to Gotham.

Sure is a lot of not killing Safiyah happening in this scene.

Circe opens a cobweb-covered section of the Bat-cave we haven’t seen before. Inside, there’s a conference room with six chairs and what I assume is a map of Gotham. In the next room is a workshop that Circe also ignores, so she misses seeing something inside that’s covered by a cloth (and if it’s what I think it is, we’ll see it next episode). Finally she finds what she’s looking for: a case containing dangerous items from Batman’s villains.

I recognized Mad Hatter’s hat, Joker’s acid flower and maybe a shock buzzer, a flower from Poison Ivy, Bane’s Venom, Killer Croc’s tooth, Clayface’s mud, and Penguin’s umbrella. Wow, there was just a whole Batman show happening before the Arrowverse even started. Oliver really did rip off Batman.

Ryan makes it back to the cave. She tries to free the others, but all of the Bat-gadgets are gone. Circe comes in and tries to shoot her with a crossbow.

This is the most restraint I’ve ever seen Alice show, and for once, I’m really not happy about it. KILL SAFIYAH!

Alice taunts Safiyah about Coryana being in ashes, but Safiyah says that with a little help from one of Poison Ivy’s vines, Coryana will be lush with Desert Roses again. Alice doesn’t know how she got that from Ivy, but Safiyah is getting it from the Bat-cave with Circe’s help. Remember when I said that it made no sense for Safiyah to kill Circe’s enemies? Well, turns out she was doing that to get on Circe’s good side so she would do her this favor.

Circe keeps shooting at Ryan and the Bat-Team with the crossbow, but she keeps missing. Hopefully that’s a sign that Kate is still in there fighting. Ryan fights Circe, giving the rest of the team time to escape. Sophie aims the crossbow at Circe, but doesn’t shoot. Circe leaves with the Bat-suit, the gadgets, and the villain items.

Safiyah continues to be a fucking monster and acts like she’s the only one who cares about Alice and can offer her safety. Alice hugs her…then stabs her in the gut with the +2 Dagger of Healing because she wants to prolong Safiyah’s death. Look, make it elaborate or ironic or funny or whatever you want to do; just follow through.

Luke apologizes to Ryan for not trusting her judgment when it came to getting Kate back. Ryan is worried about how they’re going to stop Black Mask, Circe, and Safiyah without the suit and gear. Mary has hope that they’ll find a way. Yeah, it’s in the next room over underneath a sheet. Might not fit Ryan, but I think it will totally work for Luke.

Back at Black Mask’s hideout, Roman picks up Bane’s Venom tank and asks Tavaroff if he’s ready to get started. That’s going to end well. In another room, Circe uses a chunk of Kryptonite to cut the Bat-suit into scraps.

Well, now I guess no one gets the suit. Oh well, time to make a new one!

A lot of this episode was setup for the finale, and the stakes look pretty high. No suit, no gadgets, just the team and whatever Circe may have missed in the cave. I already know one thing they’re setting up for the finale, and it’s in the trailer for that episode, but I don’t know where they’re going from here. Will it all be wrapped up next week? Will there be a cliffhanger? Will Kate return? Will Ryan still be Batwoman? WILL SOMEONE PLEASE KILL SAFIYAH ALREADY?!

Next time: DO THE THING, ALICE.

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Batwoman airs Sunday nights at 9 Eastern/8 Central on The CW. Kate Danvers would only take one thing from the Bat-cave – the giant penny – and that’s just so she can attempt to leave it in the Take a Penny/Leave a Penny dish at the nearest convenience store. She can be reached on Twitter @WearyKatie.

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.

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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.