Star City, 30 Years from Now
We begin immediately where we were left last week on Legends of Tomorrow: in a desolate, apocalyptic Star City 30 years from now (as in 2016), and the team is facing off against a Green Arrow that is most definitely not Oliver Queen. As soon as they return to the Waverider, Hunter is insistent on having nothing to do with this alternate future, but Sara is tired of Hunter’s senseless overprotection of his crew, especially of her. She demands she come with him and the Central City thieves, as she knows Star City better than anyone else on the ship.
Awkward Romances
Our needless extra plotline for the week begins with Jax getting googly-eyeing at Kendra out of nowhere while she and Ray work together on the ship. Kendra find’s Ray’s “Unwavering Optimism” enjoyable, and Jax is visibly annoyed by the two flirting, if you can call it that. Stein lashes out at Ray over the com-link about some kind of unprofessionalism, but is immediately confused by his own reaction, suggesting an emotion based link between himself and Jax as two halves of a Firestorm. Stein attempts to suggest to Jax that he boast some confidence, with his best and only example being himself that they all witnessed in the 1970s.
While Jax attempts to boast himself to Kendra, Stein picks Palmer’s brain a bit about the glances thrown between him and Ms. Saunders, revealing Ray to be the kind of person that doesn’t particularly think to be flirting, especially in dire times like these where they’re being shot at and traveling through space-time.
Of course, when Stein thinks that he’s put Jax in the clear to make a move on Kendra, Ray comes back to the professor with the idea of starting something with her stewing in his head. When Jax next encounters Stein, he can sense his guilt over the situation, and where this ternary plot began as one about awkward flirting, it became a point of a 20 year old realizing the importance of having confidence in himself.
We Built This City on Green Arrow
Out on the field, Sara,Hunter, Snart and Rory are ambushed by hoods and some sweeping Arrow soundtrack. Snart and Rory can’t help themselves and take a jont for a bank when they’re surrounded by the biker gang that they commandeer from the leader easily, and take off with them on a sweet dune buggy and a fur coat. When the two end up at a party in the gang’s hideout, Rory is especially excited by having chalices, fur coats and living like a king with this commandeered biker gang, but Snart, as the moral center of the two somehow, is looking to get back to the team.
Sara chases this Green Arrow doppelganger and questions him about the demise of Oliver Queen, thus discovering the events of an Uprising 15 years earlier, brought about by none other than Slade Wilson, or his son rather. 2046’s Green Arrow tells Sara and Hunter about Oliver Queen’s efforts to build an army to fight against Deathstroke, but, as a consistent theme of Star City has always been, the efforts were meaningless to a city of citizens that would rather evacuate than defend their home. He then leads them to Felicity Smoak’s relocated technologies: to the Green Arrow’s lair we’re so familiar with… it just so happens that the long forgotten Oliver Queen has been holed up here, as they’re approached by actor Stephen Amell who has been grizzly manned by the makeup department, and left missing an arm.
The current Green Arrow is revealed to be none other than John Diggle’s son, calling himself Connor Hawke as he’s ashamed of himself, unable to live up to his father and the lineage of that classic Team Arrow. Oliver, meanwhile tries to explain delicately to Sara that Star City might have been able to be saved if she and Ray had been there to help, that their added power could have made a difference, and is clearly feeling defeated as he gives them the code to the warehouse holding Felicity’s old tech and insisting they leave him be.
Rory and Snart meet Deathstroke Junior, who instructs his gang to hunt down a blonde girl in white and a British guy in brown. The two thieves nearly come to the point of sparing with their temperature based weapons, until Leonard convinces him to help find Sara and Hunter before they get killed. Meanwhile, Sara is having a very similar conflict that Barry had in Earth 2 in the last few weeks, becoming attached to an alternate reality that isn’t necessarily her own. When she and Hunter find the Smoak Technology they’re looking for, they’re ambushed by Deathstroke’s crew, but when Snart and Rory arrive on cue, they discover that Connor has been taken. That seems to be a consistent theme with Arrow characters this week. Rory and Snart’s conflict results in the meathead of the two getting himself knocked out, and waking up back on the Waverider, and a lecture from Leonard, insisting his noble cause of defeating Savage, for what end remains a mystery. Rory, however, isn’t taking a liking to the new motivations of his counterpart chilling out on their thieving habits, and threatens to burn him along with the rest of the world if they get into fisticuffs ever again.
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Star City Needs the Green Arrow
Sara and Hunter butt heads yet again when they get back to the Waverider, where she attempts to make him see her side of the debate of saving Connor and the future of Star City, by comparing it to his mission to save his own wife and child, even further into the future than where they are now. She heads back out into the city alone with an hour’s time so generously granted by by an angered Rip Hunter, and the first place she goes it back to Oliver for help, because she insists that no matter what, when or how, Star City always needs a Green Arrow.
As Stein convinces Hunter that leaving Sara and this version of Star City as it is would be as immoral an action as Vandal Savage’s, he send in the cavalry to help Sara and a tired Oliver Queen with a bionic arm take down Grant Wilson and his merry men. Now, with Deathstroke’s concentration of criminal activity, a new Team Arrow can make way to cleaning up the city.
While the team winds down their weekly adventure, the tertiary conflict between Jax and Ray is belittled by the fact that Kendra honestly says that her life has become far too complicated to throw into a new relationship of any kind, and the ridiculousness of the romantic tension is made note of by Gideon as they depart.
Sara, meanwhile thanks Hunter for sending in the team to help, and he shares his personal realization that he still has a lot to learn, and given the circumstances, now knows that every future is worth fighting for.
Rating: (8/10)
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