Legends of Tomorrow, season 1, episode 8. Joe Dante directs this week, and he takes all the “weird idyll” skills he developed on Gremlins and The Howling and cranks it to 11. A meteor crashes next to a couple of greasers mid-street race, and Vandal Savage, just waltzing through the woods, presumably meteor and/or truffle hunting, finds it, creeps out past the crashed greasers, and does…something… to them. Meanwhile, the crew is settling into their 1959 cover stories. The show again does a good job of mixing character interactions up to help develop everyone: After last week’s kiss, Ray and Kendra are, unsurprisingly, a married couple moving into a new house; Jax is on his own as a high school student; Stein and Sara get to spend time together as a doctor and nurse at the local mental hospital; and Rip and Snart as MAGNIFICENT G-Men (Rip’s American accent is amazing, and Wentworth Miller Wentworth Millers all over the scenery) investigating a series of “mysterious” killings. And this is where they go right at 1959: the real estate agent selling the house to Ray and Kendra, when she realizes that Kendra is the wife and not “live in help” tries to sell them someplace in another town. Sara, Jax and Stein are at the local burger shack, where Stein gets nostalgic, then called on it by the two not-white-men at the table before he and Nurse Lance head to the asylum. This was another great moment, going right after the rose colored glasses that let one group of people be nostalgic for a time that was awful for literally everyone else. It’s great that they’re not afraid to do it, and it’s great how they manage to do it. This is great – yet again, the show thrives when it spends time with its characters and drifts a bit when they propel the plot. It’s probably a function of the time travel concept: “just keep going back a day” would make a lot more sense than playing timestream detectives. But Sara and Stein and Jax and Snart are so much more interesting when they’re talking about what makes them tick than when they’re shooting people to try and demonstrate it. DC UNIVERSE TIME BUBBLES Speaking of which, Stein has a bad case of Comic Book Doctorate, where by virtue of having a Ph.D., it means Stein’s the science guy on everything. Even though he’s a genius particle physicist, this week he’s also a geneticist when he fixes Jax, after the younger half of Firestorm gets shot up with meteor juice and turned into a werehawk. (I really can’t believe they didn’t make the fix something simple like “Turning into Firestorm fixes Jax’s genetic code” or something). We’re going to have to treat “Why don’t they just turn into Firestorm” the same as the time travel crappiness: YES that would fix everything quickly, but NO then we wouldn’t have a show anymore. By the way, that’s why there isn’t much of a plot recap in this. The time travel conceit is actually a weakness to the show, because jumping around like they do only makes sense as fanservice. The reason the show is great is because they’re doing great work with the team they’ve built, developing them and growing them and playing them off of each other. I’m finding myself vastly more interested in how Snart and Rory get back together, or watching Stein and Sara’s repartee, or Jax and Rip snark on each other, than I am in figuring out how they’re going to find some random knife and stabbing Vandal Savage in the near future. If you really want to know: Savage is kidnapping teenagers and shooting them full of meteor juice to turn them into werehawks, trying to build an army for global conquest. Gideon and Stein figure out a way to fix it. Kendra tries to stab Savage. It doesn’t work. Chronos shows up and attacks the ship. I’m sure they paid a bit for Rock Around the Clock, but it’s worth it. This show’s going to end up with a sneaky good soundtrack. Vandal’s 1959 cover name is “Dr. Curtis Knox.” In Smallville, Curtis Knox was an immortal mad scientist who had the know-how to cure the mostly awful freaks of the week. He was apparently supposed to be Savage, but they weren’t allowed to use him. There are a metric ton of Back to the Future jokes in the episode. No surprise, given how openly nerdy everyone has already proven to be. “Hall H for the Criminally Insane” might be the funniest joke this show has ever told. Hall H is the room where all the big panels and trailers and movie reveals take place at San Diego Comic Con. SDCC’s crowd control and ticketing policies make this a perpetual, catastrophic shitshow.
