‘Legends of Tomorrow’ 1.04 Recap: “Always Wanted to Be a Spy”

A friend of mine who’s a bigger fan of the show than I am claimed that the fourth episode of ‘Legends of Tomorrow’ is the one where the series really kicks into gear. I wish I could agree with that, but for me the show is still struggling to make its concept work.

At least we’re finally out of the 1970s. Jetting forward a decade, Team Waverider (do we have a better name for them?) arrive in 1986 Washington, D.C., where Rip informs them that the military is holding a secret file on Vandal Savage. To find out where Savage is in this time period, all they have to do is break into the Pentagon and steal the file. No bigs, right?

Ray Palmer and Snart go undercover as janitors while Sara struts in the front door wearing an officer’s uniform and Kendra tags along as her aide. Mick then distracts the guards by arm-wrestling with them… Wait, what? This is seriously the plan? Even pre-9/11, I’m pretty sure the friggin’ Pentagon had better security than this. What’s the point of such a convoluted scheme anyway? Why not just have Ray shrink down to micro size, sneak into the building through an air vent or something, then find the file, take photos of it, and sneak out again? Wouldn’t that be a million times easier? Not to mention smarter.

Big shock, this whole operation ends up a disaster. Alarms go off and everybody has to fight their way out of the building. In doing so, Kendra goes full hawk and the warrior priestess side of her turns kind of psycho. Sara has to stop her from killing a soldier who was just doing his job. They all make a big scene and reveal their powers to the American government. Geezus, what a bunch of bumbling morons.

At the end of all this, the file reveals that Savage has defected to the USSR. En route through Soviet airspace on his trail, the Waverider is suddenly attacked by the bounty hunter Chronos. To fight him off, Rip uncloaks their ship and intentionally draws the attention of Russian MIG fighter jets, which promptly try to shoot him out of the air. Rip then pulls some fancy ‘Top Gun’ maneuvers to dodge the missiles and make them hit Chronos instead. The bounty hunter crash lands and the Waverider gets away.

According to their new intel, Savage is working with a Russian scientist named Valentina Vostok (Stephanie Corneliussen from ‘Mr. Robot’) on something called “Operation Svarog.” Palmer concocts a plan to run into her at the ballet and schmooze her into revealing her secrets, one attractive brilliant scientist to another. Unfortunately, he doesn’t speak Russian. No problem, 22nd Century science has a cure for that. Everybody pops some Universal Translator pills and now they can all speak whatever language they want.

Staying behind on the ship, Sara tries to teach Kendra how to control her inner hawk by sparring with her. This is not in the slightest bit interesting.

Rip asks Mick to come with him and find Chronos’ crash site to make sure that 1980s Russia doesn’t get hold of him or his future technology. Instead of Chronos, they find one of Rip’s Time Master bosses named Druce (Martin Donovan), who says that Chronos died in the crash. He chastises Rip for screwing around with the past so much, but offers him a deal. If Rip will return to the future and drop off his entire team in the 2016 they came from, the Time Masters will clean up his messes and set things back the way they were. The biggest downside to this deal is that Vandal Savage will go unchecked on his path toward world domination, and stopping him was the whole point of Rip’s mission in the first place. Feeling like a pretty big failure anyway, Rip says he needs a day to think about. Even a dumbbell like Mick can see that this whole thing is a trap, and tells Rip as much.

Palmer’s attempt to woo the lady scientist fails miserably. She has no interest in him in the slightest. Apparently, she prefers bad boys. Snart steps in and immediately gets her attention. She leaves the ballet with him instead. Although Snart doesn’t follow all the way through with the seduction, he manages to swipe the security badge for Vostok’s laboratory.

Rip returns to the forest to meet with Druce again. Sure enough, Mick was right. Druce double crosses him with a very much still alive Chronos. Luckily, Rip came with backup. Mick and Firestorm come out of hiding to fight off Druce and Chronos. Jefferson gets cocky and reckless, and repeatedly ignores Dr. Stein’s advice, which only winds up getting him hurt.

After the battle, Jefferson and Stein split and have a big fight. Jefferson is sick of Stein telling him what to do, to which Stein say that he needs to grow up. When Snart and Ray return with the access card for the lab, Stein goes undercover with Snart and Mick, but doesn’t take Jefferson.

At the lab, Stein finds a lot of dead bodies and concludes that Vostok and Vandal Savage are trying (unsuccessfully so far) to make their own Firestorm.

The episode ends with Vostok arriving at the lab and capturing Stein and Mick. Snart gets away with some radiation core thing that we’re told is important for some reason I can’t remember. Vostok tosses Mick and Stein in what’s said to be an impenetrable gulag. That’s the cliffhanger we’ll leave off with this week.

Episode Verdict

I’ll admit that I like the way this episode pairs up characters who aren’t normally close or haven’t much worked together before, such as Snart and Ray, or Rip and Mick. Mixing up the character dynamics like that is useful for the ensemble team aspect of the show. We can’t have Mick and Snart going off on their own together every episode.

Otherwise, however, I still find the plotting of this series frustrating. The whole conflict of the show could be resolved by going backward in time to when Vandal Savage won’t expect them, rather than forward to when he will. That giant plot hole is something that will need to be addressed eventually. Even more importantly, the team really needs to stop making so many dumb decisions when they play around in the past. That’s already getting very old.

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