yellowfred

I doubt they'd go with any sort of brainwashing for Snart, just because it would be kind of redundant, with Rip already brainwashed. Besides, I think offering him a chance to use the Spear of Destiny to rewrite reality would probably be enough to get him on board. Like, one of the first things he did on Legends was go back to try and change his and his sister's childhood by keeping their father out of prison. If they also tell him that he's destined to die in some heroic sacrifice, I doubt he'd need any additional incentive to join up. I also don't think Mick being against him would necessarily be a deal breaker for Snart, assuming he's not able to turn him. It was established last season that, if he believes he's doing what's right for them, Snart has no problem going against what Mick wants. Having the chance to rewrite their reality however it suits them would certainly qualify.

I feel like I wouldn't have minded the Nate/Amaya thing if they'd gotten caught up in a moment or something (or, if there'd been any real build up to it), but instead it was this half-hearted "well, we're already naked, why not have sex?" I guess the idea was that it had all the build-up and emotional investment of a tinder hook-up, which I guess is fine, even if it's not all that interesting to watch. Still, I agree with everyone who's said that they should have done that on their own time. Overall, I felt like the "Dealing with evil!Rip" section of the episode worked a lot better than the "Saving George Washington" part (and not just because the "Saving George Washington" part had the Nate/Amaya hook-up). In fairness, I have a bit of a weakness for "our former friend who knows us super well and who we still care about is now trying to kill us" type storylines, so I'm sure that's part of it, but it felt like there just wasn't a lot of urgency to the George Washington side of things. I mean, it seemed like a bigger deal that time that George Lucas almost didn't make movies. Also, their version of George Washington wasn't particularly well drawn, which didn't help matters any. The evil!Rip stuff was a lot of fun. I was kind of curious how the "Rip is evil now" reveal would go, but I definitely did not expect him to shoot Sara like that. It was cool getting to see Jax take over while she was down. They've really developed how much Jax and Sara trust and believe in each other this season, so it was nice to have an episode where it was more at the forefront. Also, Jax has been overdue for a focus episode and getting to watch him go full Home Alone was fun. On a side note, Sara needs to stop dying all the time.

That's a fair point, and I don't mean to say that they never did anything well last season. The bigger issue, to me, was their lack of progress. Like, getting Carter's body back and stopping the Firestorm program were both instances of them basically getting back to zero, since those were all problems that they caused. Stopping the mutant hawk factory and the nuclear bomb sale were certainly more positive, but neither of those things were actually related to his ultimate rise to power (i.e. we already knew he eventually used a mutant-hawk-free army to take over the world). Plus, stopping the nuclear bomb sale was also how Savage found out who they all were and gave him the idea for developing Firestorm (and almost the ability to make an ATOM suit way ahead of schedule). Not to mention, after nearly every one of their encounters with him, until Leviathan, the problem remained that they didn't really know how to find him again and didn't really have a way to kill him. This season, beyond the whole back and forth of artifact possession, they've made a lot more tangible progress. At the beginning of the season, they only knew that there was some rogue time traveler they were tracking. Now, they know that he's a speedster, who he's working with, what he's after, and how to track him. So, even if they have setbacks, they're not back at zero, the way they often were last season.

Yeah, that was my main problem with him, too. He was in almost every episode and, in most of them, he was working alone. It also didn't help that, on his own, he just never came across as all that imposing, which made it particularly annoying that the team never seemed to do better than breaking even with him. I think that's one of the things that has really helped this season: they've legitimately had victories against the Legion of Doom. Like, obviously they've had a lot of set backs, too, but there's a sense that they're continually making progress.

I kind of love that, even without his memories, Rip can still come up with a half baked plan that kind of saves the day (almost). Also, while I feel the whole "everyone makes reaction faces to the fact that Rip still doesn't have his memories and also can't operate a gun" thing went on a little longer than it should have, I still really enjoyed it. I do wish we'd gotten to hear more about the movie that he was writing (where Sara's the hero!). Also, I haven't been the biggest fan of Ray and Nate together, but adding Amaya into the mix as a sort of foil worked really well. As much as I've liked a lot of her stuff with Mick, I was getting a little tired of her having scenes with just him the past few episodes. It's always nice when they mix it up a little. On a side note, is that the first mention we've had of Ray's multiple PhD's? What does he even have them in? Why would he need four? I know it's basically TV shorthand for "this person is really smart," but no one needs four PhD's.

Yeah, Amy Adams had a pretty impressive run of one-episode roles on WB/CW shows. She was also on Charmed (playing a lady cursed with really bad luck) and Buffy (playing Tara's cousin).

Reading that episode description, their choice to put up that sneak peek scene last month (the one with Sara and Jax talking in the hanger) seems even stranger. Like, it kind of seems like they've already shown us how the main plot of the episode ends up.

Yeah, while I kind of get where Oliver was coming from (they were both basically homeless and kind of broke, plus the whole "being partners in nightly vigilantism" thing, so finding a place together made perfect sense), I don't think he meant it in a "let's take the next step in our relationship" kind of way. At the same time, I don't think he hated the idea of it going that way. I always got the feeling that Sara was initially considering it, but then later realized that it wouldn't work out. I also tend to think that a lot of their relationship was about thinking they could pick up where they left off on the island and eventually realizing that they'd both changed too much for that to be sustainable. I do think, regardless of how deeply you buy in to the romantic aspect of their relationship, Sara was an important enough person to Oliver that her coming back to life should have had a bigger impact on him. Probably the thing that most bothers me about the whole plotline of Laurel putting Sara in the Lazarus Pit is how perfunctory it all was. It felt like they just needed to bring Sara back so that she could be on Legends of Tomorrow, but they really didn't want to let that affect the rest of the show too heavily, so they barely let her interact with anyone other than Laurel and Quentin and, once she took off again, they acted like she'd never been there.

I think the "moment" they're talking about is pretty much just the fact that there's a shared universe among those four shows, as was solidified in the big crossover (which Snart was not in), which makes it extra strange that they didn't use the poster from the crossover. I don't necessarily mind the fact that they didn't choose Sara as the character to represent Legends, since it is an ensemble show, but the fact that they didn't even use a character that's currently on the show (also, the fact that the article doesn't even mention it by name) kind of highlights the fact that Legends is pretty much the red-headed step-child of the DCTV universe.

Guys, I don't know why you keep pointing out all these actual things that happened on the show. Did you miss the part about how their love "transcends reality?"

Yeah, the weird thing about the whole "people keep coming back to life" complaint is that they're rarely people we've actually seen die. Like, the only people who've come back from an on-screen death are Oliver (the second time), Sara (the third time), and Malcolm. I guess you could count Ray, though I never got the feeling they really expected us to believe he died. I'm not counting Slade, because he'd already come back by the time we got the flashback of his "death." Personally, I don't think they'd bring her back just because that would mean they'd have to give her something to do, which they struggled enough with before. While I agree that Black Siren is the most likely explanation, I feel like it would be a bit of a let down. I kind of want her to be a robot or something. I have absolutely no support for that theory; I just think it'd be fun.

That's actually one of the reasons that I'm happy to see Malcolm on Legends. On Arrow, they keep playing around with the idea that he's sort of on their side, because he "cares" about Thea, which has led to easily two thirds of the team's (though, mostly Oliver's) worst decisions. I am hoping we'll get more of an explanation for his presence in the Legion of Doom (especially since this version of Damien Dahrk was pulled from 1987, so it's not even like he knows him), but I feel like they've gotten off on the right foot just by not portraying him as anything other than a full-on villain.

While I could see that being the logical role for Rip to fill on the team, I think the more this show tries to explain how time travel works, the less it makes sense. This season, as a whole, has benefited a lot from their "just go with it" approach to preserving the timeline, in my opinion.

So, I was a little surprised that Malcolm's offer to Sara was to not blow up the Queen's Gambit, rather than, say, not killing her that one time. In fact, I'm a little disappointed that there was no mention of that time he killed her. It seems like a pretty significant moment in their history. Still, getting to watch Sara kick his ass was honestly cleansing to my soul. It almost made up for how lame it was that she not only let him get away but also gave him their part of the amulet. Almost. I feel like that whole thing where they exchanged the amulet piece for Stein was just poorly thought out. Like, couldn't Sara have leveraged the fact that she literally had a knife to Malcolm's throat and made a trade of his life for Stein's? Or, since Stein was apparently in the exact same spot they found Ness earlier, couldn't they have done a quick sweep of that area before handing over some powerful artifact to the villains?

So, I felt like the AU aspect worked on the level that this is probably the life that Oliver would have imagined for himself five or ten years ago. I think, prior to getting on the Gambit, he probably had the idea that he would get his more juvenile tendencies out of his system and then become more like the guy Laurel liked to pretend he was. He probably hoped that he'd make his parents proud and take over the family business. I can totally imagine pre-Island!Oliver wanting that. I think that's what he wanted as recently as the first season, which makes it a nice reflection of his journey over the course of the show. I also think it was pretty close to what Thea and Sara, even now, might consider a better version of their lives, since their loved ones are alive and the main sources of potential tension (i.e. Thea's bio-dad reveal and Sara's sex cruise with Oliver) have been conveniently erased. Plus, Diggle and Ray got... well, okay, they kind of got the shaft on this one, if I'm being honest. Sorry, guys. That being said, I don't think it worked as well as something an advanced alien race cooked up to keep them all in stasis for as long as possible. Like, why would they include so many things that would trigger their real world memories? Why would they even include a Green Arrow in a version of the world where they don't want Oliver to remember that he's the Green Arrow? Shouldn't Diggle be happily living with his wife and child (maybe children; he could have Sara and John, Jr.; that's the beauty of alien stasis hallucination worlds)? Why would they put all five of them in there together in the first place? Why make the exit a giant building that everyone can easily see and instinctively know that it shouldn't be there? I feel like the Dominators (read: episode writers) just didn't think this one through. Moving on, I liked the different ways that the characters reacted to the glitches they were experiencing. Oliver decided he needed to investigate them right away, Sara was sort of willfully ignoring them for as long as she could, and Thea figured them out and decided she didn't care. I'm not sure how much I buy that Thea would be the one okay with living in a fake reality, but no one else would have held the same emotional weight for Oliver, so I'm okay with it. I also liked that the glitches started almost immediately and that their memories seemed to start coming back almost as soon as they started talking through it. Also, on a side note, Oliver's reaction to seeing Malcolm Merlyn, even a fake hallucinated version of him, should always be "get that man the hell away from me and everyone I care about." So should Sara's, actually. And Thea's. That should just be people's general reaction to Malcolm Merlyn and I don't know why it still isn't. My only real comment on the actual reality side of things is that Rene is still the worst and he needs to learn how causation works (amongst other things).

Yeah, I really wish they hadn't included that line about how Sara "prefers girls." There are a lot of ways that you can handwave that line, if you want (it is, after all, in the same episode where Oliver was brainwashed into thinking that he wanted to marry Laurel, and I do think it was meant to be dramatic irony, since she obviously did hook up with Oliver), but there's really no good justification for writing it. I mean, if they were going for dramatic irony there, she could have just said "oh, I'd never do that to you" or "Ollie's always been yours" or even "please, that was just a crush; I'd never act on it." Like, here's the thing: for me, Sara's bisexuality is a fact of her character. She spent half of Arrow Season 2 in a serious relationship with Oliver (that's not even including their pre-series relationship) and she spent a good chunk of Legends Season 1 having a vague flirtation with Snart. I don't feel like she or the writers need to prove that by keeping some sort of even ratio between men and women that she flirts with. I'm perfectly fine with her not having romantic interactions with random historical guys she runs into (especially since the best thing she can say about most of them is that they eventually get over their sexism) and I'm actually extra fine with her not becoming involved with any of her male teammates. None of that, to me, makes her any less bisexual. That being said, I am wary of the direction that they seem to be going with this. I think there's a big difference between not acknowledging her bisexuality (at least not as openly as I might like them to) and actively retconning her sexuality, and I worry that they're leaning more towards the latter than I'm really comfortable with.

Yeah, I kind of get the feeling that Thea was only in the Flash episode so that she could be abducted, so I won't be surprised if she gets left out of the Legends part. Also, since Caitlin didn't even have a big role in the leg of the crossover where she had home field advantage, I doubt they're gonna be looking for a way to fit her in on any of the other parts.

My theory: in approximately 39 years, Barry watches the move Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and realizes that, in order to keep the timeline intact, he has to actually do all the stuff that future!him did that kept him from dying too soon. Because it's been a while, "leave a vaguely ominous message for that time traveler you met so that you and Oliver don't end up brainwashed by aliens" is kind of low on the list, so it takes him about a year to get around to it.

Yeah, I think having the "crossover" episode of Supergirl also be its midseason finale was a bad plan from the start. It was only compounded by how many storylines they felt they needed to wrap up and how little effort was put into making it a crossover.

I've actually been thinking about that. It seemed like there was enough time between Sara getting abducted and Oliver getting abducted that someone should have reacted. I don't know that I'd call it purposeful, since I don't necessarily think that Oliver, himself, could have gotten away if he'd tried. At the same time, though, if getting away had been his first thought (rather than getting his abducted friends back), he had enough time to tell Barry or Kara to get them out of there, which he didn't do. I've been thinking more about Oliver's defense of Barry, and I think that a lot of it comes from Oliver's own experience with his choices having consequences beyond his control. Like, Oliver's made a lot of decisions that weren't necessarily good or smart, but he's ended up feeling guilty and being blamed for consequences he could not reasonably have anticipated. I think that's why I'm disappointed that Sara wasn't more understanding, since that's an experience she can relate to as well.

I think this is my favorite part.

Yeah, I mentioned this in the episode thread, but I felt like a lot of the reactions to finding out about Flashpoint were driven more by the plot (i.e. needing Oliver to be the only one really in Barry's corner) than by realistic characterizations. Even Diggle, who I think had every right to be angry with Barry, isn't usually the type to let something like that distract him from the task at hand.

It's also possible that he didn't do anything obvious enough for Nate to notice. Like, Ray was living at a time well before human beings should have been around, Jax and Stein were waving around an iPhone in a medieval court, and Sara maybe started a harem in colonial Salem. Rip would probably blend in significantly better than that. Also, Nate was the one finding the historical anomalies, and we've since established that he's actually a pretty terrible historian, so maybe he's just missed Rip's version of a "come get me" sign.

I feel like they were pushing the whole "Oliver really supports and understands Barry" thing to the detriment of some of the other characters. Sara, in particular, should have empathized with at least wanting to change the past, since she had to be talked out of doing the exact same thing. Not to mention, when dealing with her own team, she's usually a lot more focused on finding solutions for when people screw up than placing blame. Also, Martin's usually pretty pragmatic, so the fact that he had no problem leaving behind two of their strongest people on a dangerous mission seemed out of character. Honestly, I feel like Diggle is the only one I would have expected that reaction from, since he was the one affected, but even he usually has more of a "we can deal with this once we're out of mortal peril" type attitude. Future!Barry's message was maybe the least helpful thing that Barry Allen has ever done. Like, if he is, in fact, referring to this fight, why doesn't he mention anything about what they'll actually be fighting or how they can defeat it? Then again, maybe he sends that message knowing how the whole thing will work out, because otherwise he and Oliver would have been mind controlled along with everyone else. I thought the scene of Supergirl learning everyone's names was cute and also probably useful for anyone who doesn't keep up with all four shows. Overall, though, I feel like she was a bit underutilized. I think that comes back to the fact that, for this episode at least, the main focus was the Oliver-Barry relationship. I don't necessarily have a problem with that, particularly since this was the Flash part of the crossover, but it seems a bit overly narrow, in some ways. Focusing on their dynamic when Flash and Arrow were the only two shows involved made sense, but adding two additional shows to the mix ought to broaden the focus a bit, in my opinion.

My understanding of the whole "J'onn's turning into a White Martian" thing was that it was just her blood, not necessarily anything added to it. Like, the White Martian's had been doing experiments and figured out that giving a Green Martian a large enough transfusion of White Martian blood would turn them into a White Martian.