The last time we were left by the team of time travelers, Chronos the bounty hunter had commandeered the Waverider, leaving Sara, Kendra and Ray unaware of the battle that has caused Snart to be captured, and put Hunter, Stein and Jax free falling through time. On the surface, this episode may look totally messy, but puts the characters in situations where their decisions in their lives up to this point eventually reach some kind of outcome: namely for Ray, Kendra and Sara being stranded in 1958, and for Leonard’s capture, but that part we’ll get to later.
When stranded in Washington after the commandeering of the Waverider, Ray and Sara are immediately at odds about why they were left, and if the rest of the team would be coming back for them at all. Sara, having just had fleeting feelings for someone for the first time since dying, seems a bit touchy on the subject, insisting that Hunter and the crew are already dead. Being the team’s unabashed optimist, Ray breaks down pieces of his Atom suit to create a time beacon. His relationship with Kendra evolves after he’s given up hope on being rescued and after two year’s he’s adjusted to his new lifestyle and is ready to propose to Kendra. It just so happens that his time beacon works, and Hunter drops the ship down on them in 1960. It turns out, in those two years, that Kendra wasn’t as attached to their newly adjusted lifestyle as Ray had been, namely in that he was a hopeless romantic with a new job as a professor, but in her case, she was beginning to lose her memory and her powers, keeping her hopeful to return to the Waverider as soon as possible. This puts an interesting strain in a relationship that, for us viewers, looks still very recent, but the feelings these two have for one another has evolved when stranded in time together for two years.
Sara, meanwhile, is nowhere to be found. The team tracks her to the home of the League of Shadows on Nanda Parbat to receive training once more from a Ra’s Al Ghul who is raising the first of his two daughters, Talia (also to be known as the most “successful” love interest of Bruce “The Batman” Wayne). In this episode, Sara is desperate to find some place that she can call home, and despite the fact that she is a ringer in the League of Shadow’s, her heart has changed for the better, and even after a duel with Kendra for her own rescue, Ra’s Al Ghul senses the struggle of light and darkness within her, and while that kind of balance is a good thing to most people, it’s not acceptable for employment by the league.
The biggest twist within this hour of Legends of Tomorrow — and possibly the series thus far — is the fate of Mock Rory after Leonard Snart left him in an unknown location and condition at the end of the seventh episode, “Marooned.” It would appear Leonard couldn’t bring himself to kill his oldest friend and so Rory was found wandering and nearly starving to death by none other than the Time Masters, and was brainwashed into becoming their bounty hunter for an unspecified amount of time, eventually becoming the bounty hunter we’ve known to be Chronos. This adds some rather cool complexities to both his character and his relationship with Leonard and the rest of the crew, and the scene in which he storms the fortress on Nanda Parbat and is swiftly taken down by a newly assembled team of Legend’s heroes, is some of the best action choreography the show has presented to date, with the added hint of redemption and vengeance for Sara, Kendra and Ray thrown into the mix of it all.
What may be the series’ best episode yet leaves our heroes with newly reinvigorated limbs and relationships, and a course is charted for the only place that Hunter knows for certain he can find Vandal Savage at this point in the adventure: The future.
Rating: (8/10)
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