‘Legends of Tomorrow’ season 2, episode 9 review: George Lucas and all sorts of silly fun
Here’s something we never thought that we would be saying at this point one year ago: “Legends of Tomorrow” is the best superhero show we’ve seen so far this week. Sure, it’s only bad two days, but this is also the fourth show in the genre we’ve watched.
The greatest thing about “Raiders of the Lost Art” was just that it was, by and large, a great deal of fun. We don’t care so much that it was insanely cheesy, and that some of the action sequences felt slapstick more so than violent or intense. It’s appropriate that we saw Ray Palmer, Nate, and Amaya enjoying a little bit of popcorn at the end of the episode, given that this is the closest thing that we’ve gotten to a popcorn movie on television in a while.
Let’s start with comedy – We enjoyed Arthur Darvill more in this one episode as movie-director Phil than we did the entire first season as Rip Hunter. This isn’t a knock on his performance, but this character was just more layered, interesting, and funny. He’s got a screwball quality as a guy in the 1960’s who’s got no idea who he is or why he’s got this repressed knowledge of things like the Spear of Destiny; he actually thinks for a little while that all of the time-travel adventures going on around him are some sort of drug trip and he’s hallucinating the majority of the stuff that is going on around him.
As we know, it couldn’t be more serious since Rip had in his position the Spear of Destiny, or at least part of it, and that is the key to changing history and the future as we know it. Unfortunately, this version of Rip didn’t quite understand that, and just thought it was a prop that he gave over to his prop-hand on the movie … George Lucas.
The implementation of George in the episode was brilliant. When Damien Darhk and Malcolm Merlyn scared him, he wanted to quit the film industry — which in turn meant that there was no “Star Wars” or “Indiana Jones,” and as a result of that no inspiration for Ray or Nate to take on their career paths — the fact that Ray looked at being a heart surgeon in the alternate timeline as some sort of affront was hilarious; the same goes for Nate being a yoga instructor of all things. We really dig the idea of the buddy-cop story being two guys who really don’t have any natural crimefighting ability at all.
Yet, in spite of their deficiencies, they were eventually able to get George back doing what he does best — with Amaya’s help. He’s now on his way to making “Star Wars” again, though it took another showdown with the Legion of Doom to get him there. Unfortunately, the Legends weren’t so successful in keeping Phil a.k.a. Rip away from the bad guys, since the Legion now have him and apparently Damien and Malcolm are going to torture him within an inch of his life. Here’s the odd thing: Aren’t these two guys smart enough to realize that he’s not keeping a secret? This guy is basically the movie-making equivalent of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo! There’s gotta be another way to get through to him.
The trouble with Rory – He’s feeling emotions. Really, this whole subplot with Martin Stein, Rory, and the experiments was a lot of filler to get us to the conclusion that Rory’s seeing his friend as a result of his own conscience and memories of him. Here’s the thing, though — as long as he’s not being Chronos (curse the show for even reminding us of that), we could watch Mick change a light bulb and be thoroughly entertained. He is ridiculous, but we mean that in the best possible way.
Overall – There was so much to like in this episode just in terms of comedy, whether it be the “Howard the Duck” joke to relishing just how ridiculously overpowered Eobard is as opposed to everyone else. So long as you ignore logic, “Legends of Tomorrow” is a hoot — it’s silly, over-the-top, and it’s exactly what we need in a pretty depressing time. We could watch episodes like this one all day. Grade: A-.
Next week – We are going to get a story entitled “The Legion of Doom,” and it’s going to provide an opportunity to finally learn a thing or two more about our Big Bads of the season. You can watch a promo for that over at the link here. (Photo: The CW.)