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Legends of Tomorrow: Left Behind

"They’re not coming back.”

“Left Behind” is so jampacked with stuff that I have to address it character-by-character.

Kendra and Ray

The series of short vignettes about Sara, Kendra, and Ray’s life from 1958 to 1960 was sort of wonderful. The one where they suddenly had lots of furniture was heartbreaking: it was so indicative of how completely they had given up hope, yet committed to not living hopelessly.

Because they did have something to live for: love. Kendra and Ray’s relationship sped into hyperdrive, which makes me happy. Not because I love them together (my antipathy for Brandon Routh has a contagious effect, spreading towards all those around him) but because now we don’t have to slog through any more flirtations.

(Ray liking his life even though he had to grade midterms by hand was pretty cute. I admit it.)

Sara

Sara managed to overcome her bloodlust in Nanda Parbat, which I think is the main takeaway from that segment. Her experience of time-drift was interesting, mostly because I think “When one spends too long in an alien timeline, one loses ties with one’s former self, former identity” is sort of a nice description of making dramatic life changes, too.

Snart and Chronos/Rory

Snart, meanwhile, got trapped by Chronos, who is Rory?! Wow! I really did not see that coming, especially since I spent most of this episode wondering why Chronos’s mask looked so much like Zoom’s on The Flash. I’m glad Rory is back in the game, since I like Dominic Purcell and Wentworth Miller together. And I like that Chronos has a backstory, so he’s not just a faceless villain.

All in all, I liked this episode more than any other Legends of Tomorrow has given us. Some of that is just bias—I love vignette-montages that compress dramatic developments into a short sequence. Some of it is the way that the flash-bang fight scenes and tech-speak were in service of character development, since I'm more interested than the characters than the mission on this show.

But some of it is also the way this episode acts as something of a reboot: Sara has gotten over her bloodlust and her weird codependence on the League of Assassins. Ray/Kendra (Kendray?) are committed. And Rory is back, but in a new way. That lets our heroes get back on track with some decent course-corrections taken care of.

Everybody Remember Where We Parked

• Ray: “As a former Eagle Scout with over 100 merit badges—no big deal…”

• Sara: “Ugh. I miss Netflix.” This week’s Flash mentioned Netflix, too. Nice product placement!

• Rip: “Peace with the League of Assassins? That must be the first time that sentence has ever been uttered.”

• Ray: “We were meant to be tortured and executed in Nanda ‘I can’t believe I’m back here’ Parbat.”

• Chronos/Rory said that he could kill Snart’s sister over and over again, but wouldn’t that create a really wild time anomaly?

• Speaking of time-travel: Rory said that he was left on the planet for so long that he almost went crazy, even though Snart planned to come back for him. However, since Rory told Snart that—and Snart found out he had become Chronos—that’s probably why they never went back for him, since it would have caused a paradox (on Snart’s side, not Rory’s).

Four out of four lucky water vases. Or regenerated hands. Way to go, show! I think you've hit your stride.

Josie Kafka is a full-time cat servant and part-time rogue demon hunter. (What's a rogue demon?)

5 comments:

  1. This is something only a die hard original Star Trek fan would notice, but the scene where Ray was trying to create the beacon was an inadvertent, or possibly vertent, homage to what Spock did when he and Kirk were trapped in the 1930s in the classic time travel episode, "The City on the Edge of Forever." Stone knives and bearskins. And I loved Ray with the glasses! Clark Kent returns. You know I like Brandon Routh and I thought his love of teaching and sadness at leaving 1960 was the best Ray stuff yet.

    The Mick reveal shocked me. So did Snart shattering his own hand to free himself. Ouch. I thought Mick was planning to kill Lisa in 2016, and then go back in time and kill her again earlier, or something perverse like that.

    "Nanda I can't believe I'm back here Parbat." lol.

    What's wrong with being a librarian, Kendra? Huh?

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  2. Catching up after some crazy weeks. I loved this episode! Feels like it's finally becoming the show I always wanted it to be. Finally the Ray/Kendra stuff feels earned. Arthur Darvill was taking about regeneration. We got to go back to Nanda Parbat, meet Talia (Batman fans probably loved that), and finally know why Nyssa rescued Sara and how Sara joined up with the League in the first place.

    But I loved the reveal that Chronos is Mick Rory - especially since I made a wild guess that he was after Snart abandoned him (because of course he wasn't dead, no body). Only thing that bothered me was that the rest of the team wanted to help him find redemption now. Why not before, when he had only betrayed him to the space pirates?

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  3. Dominic Purcell being in the opening credits gave away Mick's big reveal. According to Rip, Mick isn't the Chronos because he was there when they fought Chronos in the beginning, but I don't understand why not with time travel and everything.

    Do you ever notice that in The Flash they worry a lot about messing up the time line and in this it's not at all a concern?

    I loved the Talia inclusion.

    There is nothing wrong with being a librarian!

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  4. I also love vignette-montages that compress dramatic developments into a short sequence. They're just so elegant when done right, and it makes the storyteller in me very happy. The Ray/Kendra stuff was incredibly sweet, even if the 2 year time skip (for them) did absolutely nothing in helping my feeling that the romance just feels incredibly rushed. They started flirting what, three episodes ago? And now Ray is ready to be engaged? I know that ti fits in the story, but I kinda wanted to seethe development a bit more. Especially since they have "Doomed Love Story" written ALL over them.

    Rory being Cronos confuses me. Just this episode, we had a line about being unable to go to past events that they directly had a han in because of time-y wime-y ness. So how was Rory Cronos the entire time? Wouldn't there be massive time paradoxes? Speaking of, what are Time Anomalies? Those sound important.

    I really loved Wentworth Miller's acting when he realizes that Cronos was Rory. He looked like a scared little boy when his sister was threatened. I just wanted to hug him.

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  5. I love that time-y wime-y ness is now just a general time travel term!

    I wonder what happened to Talia? I can't remember hearing anything about her before in the arrowverse.

    I felt like Sara going 100% league and willing to get her teammates executed was... Idk. It felt off. I thought maybe it was the herbs but they didn't get second mention so the whole "let's get my teammates executed" thing was maybe just time drift? It felt like a little extreme.

    Security in and around Nanda Parbat isn't what it used to be. Or rather, what it will be?

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