written by Kate Danvers
SPOILER WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT
Y’all, this show…
Mick wants to spend the weekend with Lita, so he brings her onboard the Waverider. Yup. Excellent parenting. Not only is it Take Your Daughter To Work Day, it’s also Take Your Pet To Work Day because Gary has a little dog named Gary Jr., his emotional support animal. Gary Jr. leaves a little puddle on the bridge because he’s not “ship-broken” – oh hey, the title!
Charlie is ready to start using the Loom of Fate, but there’re differing opinions on who should be brought back first. Astra and Constantine are Team Bring Astra’s Mom Back, Zari and Nate are Team Bring Behrad Back, and Ava is Team Wake Up My Girlfriend. Charlie gets the deciding vote, since she’s the one doing the weaving, and attempts to bring Behrad back. His thread is very tangled – either because of time travel or because he was retconned into existence a year earlier – but Charlie is confident she can bring him back. She can’t, though, and an explosion of energy knocks all the Legends down and tears through the ship, taking most systems offline.
Still a better outcome than most of my sewing projects.
Everyone is okay, but the ship is on emergency power. Due to some weird temporal interference, they can’t time travel with the Waverider, the jump ship, or the time couriers. Folks, we have ourselves a bottle episode. Charlie never used the Loom without her sisters, so she doesn’t think she can do it alone.
Sara awakens from her coma, but she’s blind. In low-power mode, Gideon can’t diagnose what’s wrong with her, so Sara has to wait it out. When she touches Ava, she sees a vision of her laying dead with a knife in her back. Sara dismisses this, puts on a blindfold, and heads off with her seeing-eye girlfriend to fix the ship. She continues to have visions of dead Legends and gets very concerned when she hears that Astra is onboard.
Lita needs to study for a history test, and since she can’t travel back in time to collect historical figures in a series of wacky hijinks that would lead to an on-stage history report that cements her future as a musician who brings about a utopian society, she’s gotta hit the books. Oh, they also have a historian onboard. That should help.
Astra tries to “help” Zari by suggesting to her that Charlie just needs to warm up with an easier thread that hasn’t been tangled by time travel. Like Astra’s mom! Oh gosh, but that would sound so bad coming from Astra. Maybe if Zari put forth the idea, it would sound better? Zari pretends to go along with it, but smells the bullshit.
Sara finally tells Ava and Charlie about her visions. She dismisses them as nightmares, but Charlie thinks they’re visions of the future. Sara compares Ava’s current shirt to the shirt she saw in her vision. Yep, future.
Even blind, Sara’s hand goes right to Ava’s boobs. Keeping that sixty-ninth sense sharp.
Charlie thinks the killer is Astra, Zari tells them about Astra trying to manipulate her, and Gary has found the box that the Loom rings were in stuffed in the garbage chute. While they can’t prove anything because access to the security feeds is offline, Astra is locked up for the safety of the others.
In an attempt to talk up Mick to his daughter, Nate tells Lita that Mick’s thieving bankrolls the Legends’ whole operation. Lita is then shown Mick’s treasure room. She criticizes him for not putting his money where it can collect interest, as well as not using time travel to make sure-fire investments. She kinda has a point until she suggests investing in Bitcoin. I guess in theory you could travel to dates where its fluctuating value is actually worth a damn. Mick doesn’t trust banks and he’s not onboard with making money the Biff Tannen way, so he kicks her out of his money bin.
Sara has another vision of the stabbings and sees her own reflection holding a knife. She has Ava and Constantine lock her in a room, even though they’re sure she wouldn’t actually do that. Weirdly, rather than questioning what might influence her to kill them, they just assume she’s lost her mind…but not in the “Imma murder you” way, just the “I have future visions that say Imma murder you” way.
Zari channels the hacking abilities of her alternate timeline self to pull up the backup security feeds. They show Charlie taking the rings and flushing them down the toilet, Zari sabotaging the ship’s cameras, and Nate sabotaging the food fabricator. They think they’ve been mind-controlled by Astra.
Gary goes to see Sara and lends her Gary Jr. because she needs an emotional support animal more than he does at the moment. Awww. …Then Gary Jr. tells Sara to kill Gary, which she does by snapping his neck. Gary Jr. then tells her to “kill them all” and Sara gets a murderous look on her face.
When a Good Boy tells you to murder, you gotta murder. I don’t make the rules.
Nah, this is all a vision that Sara has after being handed the dog. She runs to the bridge and tells Constantine and Ava about the totally plausible talking dog compelling her to kill everyone.
SARA: “I can prove to you that I’m telling the truth, all right? I had a vision that I killed Gary, then in real time I saved him and the fact that he is alive right now proves that I am not lying!”
CONSTANTINE: “You were right to lock yourself up, love.”
Meanwhile, Zari zooms out the security footage and sees the dog barking at all of them as they’re doing shady stuff. Is this really happening?
Reluctantly, Ava and Gary search for Gary Jr. while Constantine watches Sara. Ava questions the dog’s disobedience and asks where Gary even got him. Gary reluctantly admits that he rescued the pooch…from Hell. Ava says that Gary adopting a hellhound is as ludicrous as the StabCast she did on the Son of Sam. You know, the serial killer who initially told investigators that his neighbor’s dog was actually a demon who told him to kill.
…
…Excuse me a moment.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
I had to capture this image of most of the cast cowering before a widdle doggie’s reign of terrier.
The dog goes to the lab and presents some compelling arguments for why Nate should kill Zari and Charlie, but Gary stops him with a dog whistle. His plans foiled, the dog assumes his true form: a fiery hellhound. The group takes shelter in Astra’s cell. Unable to get through, the dog escapes into the ventilation system. When Astra hears that the Son of Sam’s dog is the culprit, she leaves the cell, locks the others inside, and goes to take care of things herself.
Lita has locked Mick out of the library, but when the hellhound attacks, Mick breaks in to save her. His flamethrower is ineffective against the fiery demon dog. Sara has a vision that Mick is going to die in the library, so she and Constantine rush there. Constantine gets the dog to chase him instead and Sara does a sweet flip-kick thing when the dog pounces. Constantine can’t send it to Hell without knowing its true name, and right on schedule, Astra shows up and tells him it’s “Marchosias.” The demon doggo is sent back to Hell.
Mick and Lita come to an understanding and she calls him “Dad,” Zari and Astra find a weird mutual respect, the ship is repaired, and Gary has fished the rings out of the waste disposal unit. Gary also has a a new emotional support animal to boot – a fluffy bunny. He assures Ava and Sara that this one isn’t from Hell; he got it from a carnie who warned him not to feed it after midnight.
I can’t tell if he’s joking, and that concerns me.
With Gideon back online, Sara is ready for a medical scan. Gideon can’t find anything wrong with her eyes, though, so there’s nothing she can do.
Yikes. Have a screengrab of Sara kicking a hellhound mid-backflip.
Hot.
This was silly good fun. Either I’m stupid or I was just tired when I first watched this episode, because I didn’t see the dog twist coming. I was trying to figure out if Lita stole the rings for some reason, if there was another shapeshifter onboard, if the Legends were somehow affected by the Loom shockwave, or if they picked up some kind of mind-control parasite in Hell. Evil doggo was at the bottom of my suspects list. That just made me appreciate the episode more, though.
I knew using the Loom wouldn’t be that easy, or that they might have to do some work to reconstruct it. At this point, I think the solution might have something to do with Sara’s condition. A blind Paragon of Destiny with the ability to see the future might be able to help Charlie with the burden of using the Loom.
Finally, I appreciate the dual meaning of the episode title so much.
Next time: The Legends are going Greek! …or back to Greek, in Charlie’s case.
Legends of Tomorrow airs Tuesdays on the CW at 9 ET/8 CT. Kate is really more of a cat person and can be found on Twitter @WearyKatie.