squidprincess

Gideon's regrown limbs, so I suppose a broken neck isn't out of the question. (It does raise the question of why she couldn't help conjure up some clotting factor for Nate back in JSA though.)

How is brainwashed Rip Hunter the most effective member of the Legion of Doom by far? Eobard must be wondering why he's even bothering with Darhk and Malcolm at this point. Unless it's to keep Rip from deciding he should be in charge. I loved the episode, but it was so hard to watch in some ways. And honestly, I really hated the Nate and Amaya bits. I mean, I might have thought they were cute if they weren't happening while other teammates were fighting for their lives.

Well, at least Phil is kind of scrawny. It might have been a lot harder to fit him, Darhk and Merlyn in that thing if Rip Hunter had been played by Routh or Purcell.

Maybe it's a hallucination or a dream sequence on Mick's part? All the interviews have really said at this point is that there's friendship but it's not romantic for Amaya. And that there's a love scene coming up, but they didn't necessarily say it was real. I suppose there doesn't really need to be a reason for two attractive people to have a fling, but it seems out of character for Amaya to do anything like that on a mission. And the glimpse we saw didn't really look like the Waverider.

Well, that explains what happened to the JSA. I wasn't expecting evil!Rip to last more than one episode, so this will be interesting. I think he'll be a pretty formidable adversary.

Phil was surprisingly awesome when he got the Legion to fight each other. I mean, okay, they made up. But still. Well done, Phil. The Lily plot line was very sweet in the end, but I'm a bit angry at Mick for his "fake food for a fake person" comment. There's being bluntly insensitive and being cruel. I thought that crossed the line. I'll get over it, I'm sure.

I have to admit, I'd be very surprised if they lost Darvill after they bent over backwards to accommodate his Broadchurch commitment. It seems like if they were going to get rid of him completely, they'd have just wrote him out more permanently in Out of Time. I also love the Legion of Doom. I'm curious about what they're going to do with Merlyn. The other Legion characters seem to already be set to pair off in an adversarial sense. Eobard and Rip seem to have a past. and are the characters who actually, presumably, have some idea what is going on. Sara wants to destroy Darhk for Laurel. It sounds like But Merlyn doesn't seem to pair off as easily. I suppose Sara has just as much right to a grudge against him as she does with Darhk, but she seems far more focused on the Darhk issue. Merlyn seems like the odd man out.

This was shown a little in the episode Compromised (Fifth episode of this season.) We don't know where Merlyn came from yet, but we saw Eobard recruit Darhk in 1987. He had a time sphere, like the one he had Cisco build in the Flash season finale. (This may be significant, because in said season finale, Eobard claimed that Rip Hunter built the first one. It's also Rip Hunter's primary means of time travel in the comics.) Anyway, the time sphere is how Darhk, and presumably Merlyn, travel though time. I had originally assumed that the Reverse Flash was the one from Flashpoint. But now I wonder, because it certainly seemed like he recognized Martin. I am starting to wonder if this Eobard may actually remember being Harrison. (Maybe the grandfather paradox is what he wants to fix with the spear?)

I thought the Time Masters were actually the best villains of season one. Even if their motives turned out to be a bit convoluted in the end, I thought the show did a really great job of unfolding them throughout the season. They start off looking like a cheap knockoff of the Time Lords of Gallifrey, but as the episodes continued, there'd be more and more about them that didn't sit right. For example, their ambush of Rip in Russia didn't make sense if their only issue was just protecting the timeline: Rip was planning to surrender. Then we got to see how they treated Rip and Miranda, what they did to Chronos, sending assassins to murder children and so on just took the cake. By the time Rip brought Savage to them in River of Time, it was clear they were somehow working with him, but the reveal was still dramatically satisfying. And there were still those extra twists of the knife that came afterward. Donovan's Druce was a bit on the "obviously sinister" side, but I thought the whole slow build/peel the onion reveal was really well done.

I have been wondering if maybe Lily will turn out to be the romance that they've hinted at for Mick this season. It would set up a funny sort of situation where Martin would essentially be Mick's father in law. I could enjoy that idea, but I hope they develop Lily beyond just being a love interest if that's the case. There's nothing wrong with romance but that shouldn't be all she gets.

Have they really been winning? The team has had some clear unequivocal victories but they were in episodes like Abominations and Outlaw Country. Shogun, arguably, but that was caused by Ray and his suit. They didn't even know there was any connection between Rex's killer, the aberrations and Rip's disappearance until this episode. It isn't clear that Eobard intended anything from the nuke in New York, or the JSA thing except to lure the team there. Chicago Way explicitly told us the same about the Eliot Ness fiasco. Right now, the team knows there's a speedster but not his name or origin. They know about Darhk and Merlyn because they weren't hiding. They can't track Eobard himself, only the aberrations that he'shouldn't caused deliberately to lure them there. They did get the compass, but they lost the only person who has any knowledge of what's going on. My guess is that next step, the team will start trying to find the rest of the spear and it's hard not to see that as just saving Eobard some legwork. I am sure the team will be able to stop Eobard by the end of the season, but right now, the team has very little to show for their efforts. I don't see that as the team's fault though, it's more of an effect of the weird stagnancy of the metaplot in the first half of the season. The team wasn't allowed to be proactive or move forward in the metaplot, or even be aware of the metaplot until now. It reminds me a lot of the first season of Agents of SHIELD before the Hydra reveal. There were standalone episodes, hints of a larger theme, lots of great character development. But they were kind of stuck in a holding pattern until the could go forward with the HYDRA stuff. Now the Legion is revealed and things are moving. So I think we'll start seeing a lot more metaplot action and clear unequivocal victories for the team. I do tend to think Eobard will survive the season though. Why waste an effective villain?

I don't think it's a matter of the team having had "legitimate victories" over Eobard, but a matter that Eobard has a very clear plan and we can see him actually having set backs. Every time the team clashed with Vandal Savage, with the exception of Progeny and River of Time, they had a fairly clear victory: they stopped his nuclear weapon sale (Pilot), they got Carter's body back and dismantled his cult (Pilot 2->Blood Ties), they stopped the Firestorm program (White Knight, Failsafe), they stopped the hawk-teenaged-whatever that nonsense was and blew up his lab (Night of the Hawk), and they destroyed the Leviathan and captured Savage (Leviathan). But the problem is, I think, that the team kept encountering Savage at different times, when he was just doing his thing. They would inevitably wreck the thing, but it never felt like a real victory, because we didn't get to see him deal with the setback and regroup. Every time they met him, he was back in command of something new. Eobard on the other hand, basically comes out with something he wants in every encounter. We only briefly glimpse him in Out of Time, but in JSA, he kills Rex and gets the amulet. In Compromised, he loses the other half but gets Darhk. In Chicago Way, he gets both halves and assembles the compass. In Raiders, he loses the compass, but gets Rip. Even when he loses, he kind of wins. But it feels like more of a victory for the team, because we can see that Eobard is planning something. We see him have to rethink and regroup. So we can actually appreciate the win.

I didn't mind Savage being hands on in his projects. He always seemed like the sort to occasionally like to get his hands dirty and remind himself of the more primal parts of life. I can imagine that while he's fooling around with hawk monster-teens, he's got underlings doing more important stuff. A guy needs a break to relax sometimes. I think my biggest problem was the Hath-Set part of his motivation. Like johntfs says, Vandal Savage isn't a Law and Order: SVU villain. His grudge against Rip made sense for the character. I think there are two parts to that grudge: the first is that Rip is the enemy who comes closest to actually killing him, and has access to weapons and technology beyond Savage's ken. The second is that Rip is indefatigable: it doesn't matter what he does to this guy, imprisonment, torture, eventual murder of his family, this guy just keeps trying to thwart and defy him. For someone as obsessed with power as Savage, it makes sense that this person would be his cult's satan figure. The one person he's obsessed with defeating above everyone else. Kendra/Chay'ara is a very beautiful woman. But Hath-Set's motives are far baser than Savage's. Lust and possession are all well and good, but how many times can you continue to murder a girl who says no, before it just gets old? I suppose in one sense, the motive with Kendra at this point is very similar to the motive with Rip: this is the one person who keeps defying him no matter how much power he has. But I don't think that aspect really carries through. It should be about rage/greed, not lust at this point. That doesn't really come through in his scenes with her. I think that's a problem with the writing/direction more than acting. They've made the Kendra obsession about sex, and the Rip obsession about power. Really BOTH obsessions should be about power.

Damn. I was hoping for Mick and Amaya. I don't necessarily mind the idea of Nate and Amaya, but it makes me nervous. Pairing the new characters together is not always a good idea. It could end up with us losing both. I would have been happier seeing Amaya with Jax, Ray, or even Rip (assuming he's in his right mind, they could bond over tragic losses and the sheer horror about what the team will do without supervision) instead of Nate. Oh well.

It's funny, I actually came out of it with a different impression. Both of the performances of "Rip" and "Vandal" in the student film were laughably bad. But the scene they were referencing was one of the few scenes where I thought Vandal's menace and intellect came through. And I think that was entirely on the strength of Crump (and Darvill), because, as these actors show, it certainly wasn't the script that made the scene work. If they really wanted to slam Crump, then they should have used one of his scenes with Kendra. Because that's generally where he seemed the most uncomfortable with the role. He seemed to sell it at lot better with Rip than Kendra, IMO.

Maybe he needs them to help get the other parts of the spear? It seems like the sort of thing that might have a "pure of heart" requirement, and Eobard definitely wouldn't apply. It's also interesting that Eobard recognized Rip. And Rip did have an anti-speedster gun in his weird secret armory that no one even blinked at. (I still find that funny. It's just like this week's brain surgery interlude. The crew is just like "...of course.") I wonder if Rip, in his right mind, may not know a few tricks to exploit against Eobard.

If anything, I think the fact that they bent over backwards to accommodate Darvill's Broadchurch filming is a pretty clear sign that they want to keep him. Otherwise, they could have easily wrote him out in a more permanent way. The other actors seem pretty invested too. The one character I wonder about is Martin. Victor Garber is wonderful, but he's getting up there in age. If he's growing tired of the role, who could blame him? The storyline that they've set up now might work fairly well as an exit though. And I'd bet the writers could finagle a way for Lily Stein to end up inheriting his half of the Firestorm role if they want.

You're doing a big discredit to the rest of the team. At the beginning, we had Jax and Ray being concerned. We had Martin looking delighted when Sara told him they found Rip, his attitude in the police station, and the infirmary later when they found out exactly what Rip must have done to himself. We had Jax apparently actually reading that script (the non-lethal weapon line should not have been as funny as it was, but Franz really delivered it well). The whole reason Ray realized he had a problem was because he was trying to use his science skills to help with Rip's situation and couldn't. After that, Ray and Nate were more focused on their own problems, but that's understandable. Rip was safe in the infirmary, while their own, useful skills were suddenly compromised. But at the end, they were even about to forgo movie night because of what was happening with Rip, until Gideon convinced them otherwise. And of course Jax was worried about Sara, anyone would be. That doesn't mean he wasn't worried about Rip too, it just means that Sara is the person he can help right now. And none of that is remotely relevant to who should be the leader (which is also not the same as the hero of the story either). But that question probably won't be on the table for a fairly long time. Rip doesn't seem like he'll be in any shape to command the Waverider for quite a while, even if he wanted to.

To be fair, Phil's plan actually did work. He just had to bring Gideon in for the last bit. :-) The gun moment did last just a little too long but I found Sara's face, when she realized that Rip wasn't himself still, oddly heartwrenching.

IIRC, he turned off Gideon because she wouldn't have allowed him to use the time drive like that, but it was the time drive that both rewrote/scattered him, not the Spear. They'll probably clarify later, but the way I understood it was that if he used the spear itself, it would have literally wrote him out of existence. They remember him, and his stuff exists, so I think that's ruled out.

It wasn't the spear that caused him to lose his memories, it was whatever he did with the time drive after he turned Gideon off. So theoretically, at least, his memories should be retrievable.

It was lovely to have Rip, or "Phil" back again. :-) And it's good to see that Arthur Darvill still has his exquisite comedic timing.

I wonder if we won't see a temptation plot when it comes to the spear. Grief has been a pretty steady subplot this season: Mick for Snart, Amaya for Rex, Sara for Laurel. And well, Rip's grief over Miranda and Jonas was the driving emotional arc of season one. Any one of those characters may have a hard time resisting using the spear, if it really can alter reality and bring loved ones back.

I think Camelot 3000 will be the King Arthur ep. There were quite a few behind the scenes photos of characters in armor.

I have to admit, I tend to agree about Nate. He's likable enough most of the time, but I can't quite figure out what he brings to the table that the other characters don't provide already. His skillset is kind of redundant when Rip and Gideon have always been able to provide historical context in the past. It's been arguably useful now, but only because Gideon's been weirdly quiet and Rip's been gone. They might be able to stretch his usefulness out a bit longer, depending on the nature of Rip's amnesia, but eventually the Time Master will get his memory back. In terms of personality, he's very similar to Ray, but without some of Ray's more sensitive, compassionate qualities. And if we need someone to make a social faux pas on a mission, we have Ray or Mick or sometimes even Martin to provide. I think his powers are sometimes very useful, but I'm not sure there aren't other solutions (Ray did become gigantic in Leviathan after all.) I keep holding out hope that there's some kind of twist about him, like that his "physicist friend" who got him interested in Time Travel was Eobard or something. I don't necessarily want him to be evil or anything, I'd just like something unique to justify his presence.