Wednesday, January 22, 2020

My Review of Legends Of Tomorrow's 5x01: "Meet The Legends"


Written by Grainne Godfree & James Eagan
Directed by Kevin Mock

Ava (to everyone): "The public are gonna love this ending."

Well, we're back from the events of Crisis On Infinite Earths where over half of our cast members stayed away but everyone is back and this week, it's the wonderful world of documentaries as our wacky crew deal with being famous, much to the derision of Sara of course.

For this show, it's not the craziest thing they could've done and there was certainly a lot of fun to be had as Mick talked about stealing things, Mona showed her skills as a literary agent, Ava bumbled quite a bit and the likes of Ray, Nate and Behrad all hammed it up a bit for the cameras while Charlie took a ship and got the hell out of there for good measure.

Of course, all of this eventually got to Sara as the gang's attempts (following some well meaning but ultimately bad advice from Ava) to avoid talking about Oliver's death made Sara snap and lash out all of her feelings of the events of that big crossover that so many sat out. I'm loving all the post-Crisis continuity on all the shows at the moment and it's great to see Sara not hold her anguish in for anyone.

As for the main plot, we're into Encore territory where each week, some horrible figure from history thanks to Astra gets a second chance to be a pain on humanity and the attention turned to Rasputin (Michael Eklund) as the gang all tried to come up with different ways to deal with him and mostly getting it wrong.

Let's see - Mona went down the romantic route until Mick intervened, Ava tried and failed to assassinate him twice while Nate tried to get him to think beyond revenge and seemed to make some headway before the idea of a captive director (poor Kevin Harris) propelled his desire to kill the Romanovs on live television.

Of course the gang did eventually find a rather gruesome way to deal with Rasputin and when Constantine and Gary weren't removing a demon named Masher from a young boy, John used Rasputin to bring himself back to hell, so an encounter with Astra definitely won't be far off as there are more Encores to be dealing with throughout the series.

As for the rest of the episode, the Legends delved into the art of ruining Kevin's movie to maintain their non fame, found a Faberge Egg to coup their costs and it seems we're not going to have to wait too long for Zari to reappear as Nate and Behrad worked out why Gideon was acting up throughout the episode. As for Behrad, I do like him but it seems pointless getting too attached to him as I feel we'll lose him as soon as Zari's memories and so on are restored to the show.

- Nora and Ray are an official item now and she's largely relegated to fairy godmother duties, much to her annoyance. Despite being mentioned, Astra didn't appear in the episode.
- Mona got something of a nice but lowkey exit taking over Mick's Rebecca Silver books. Even though the character didn't work, this was a respectful way of writing her out.
- Despite coming back last week, this is actually the premiere episode and the show won't be back again until February.
- Chronology: 1917 Russia for most of this episode.

Meet The Legends served as a fun premiere episode. The Encore plot was nicely set up, the mockumentary main plot was a lot of fun and the somewhat rebooted group dynamic also worked rather well too. I've missed this show and this was a nice return to form for the series.

Rating: 8 out of 10

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