written by Kate Spencer
SPOILER WARNINGS ARE IN EFFECT
This week, one of the season’s villains has been captured aboard the Waverider. The Legends have everything well in hand and nothing could possibli go wrong.
Whoa, déjà vu.
Gideon is still processing the data from the medallion, and it’s slow going. Nate is concerned because his grandfather has the last piece of the Spear…well, and because of that whole fabric of reality thing. Sara has had no luck interrogating Rip, as the only things he’s told her are several variations of “go to hell”. Rip used to be an orphan cutpurse as a child, so I think Sara might be cleaning up his message a bit there. Since he’s not willing to help and they don’t know how to restore his mind, Rip is going to be left in the brig where he can’t hurt anyone.
I give it two minutes.
…oh, less than one.
In the brig, Rip calls out for Gideon but she says she’s been told not to listen to his commands. Well, okay, the Legends are smarter than I gave them credit for at the end of last episode. Rip then uses one of many code phrases he has programmed into Gideon to get her to open the cell door and okay they are as dumb as I implied. Interestingly though, Gideon refuses the first time, asking Rip not to make her do that. Gideon has a very strange level of autonomy which I hope gets explored in a future episode. Does she have needs and desires? Can she act beyond her programming?
T-minus 32 minutes.
Wait, what’s that for? That…that’s not a good sign, is it?
Rip locks down the ship, grabs a gun from the hidden armory, steals the medallion, sets the ship to self-destruct, and heads for the jumpship. Jax attempts to regain control of the ship by rebooting Gideon while Mick, Amaya, and Nate intercept Rip. They’re able to reach him before he escapes, but Rip destroys the medallion. Jax reboots Gideon and the Waverider, but the ship loses power and crashes in the Cretaceous period. The Waverider needs one of those little signs with the changeable numbers on the bridge: “It Has Been 00 Days Since the Last Time-Space Clusterfuck.” Gideon apologizes and informs them of the exact year: 69,997,983 B.C. The Waverider defaulted to the oldest destination in its navigation logs – the year Ray was time-scattered to in the first episode of the season.
A very important piece of the Waverider broke off during the crash and they need it to get back home, so Ray, Amaya, and Nate are sent out looking for it, leaving the others with Rip. Mick suggests a procedure the Time Masters used to do to him – a sort of Inception thing where they’ll be able to go into Rip’s mind and fix it. Sara and Jax volunteer to jack into the Matrix, but are warned that Rip himself thought the procedure was barbaric and dangerous. Heh, he probably just didn’t want anyone seeing all the porn in his mind.
T-minus 25 minutes.
…now I’m getting worried.
Rip’s mind conveniently looks like the Waverider, but it’s filled with Vandal Savage’s soldiers from 2166. Jax suggests arming themselves if they’re going to be going up against the horrors of Rip’s mind, so they go for guns, which work on the first soldier they try them on. Future soldiers aren’t their only problem though, because they get attacked by Evil Sara! The two Saras fight, but are of course evenly matched until Jax shoots Evil Sara. They’re afraid there might be evil versions of all the Legends (and a regular version of Mick) in Rip’s mind, so they proceed with caution.
Outside, Nate and Amaya flirt when Ray isn’t around. Amaya has changed her mind about fraternization thanks to her run-in with Courtney last episode. Seems a relationship might be brewing, but they’re distracted by Ray running from Gertrude – a Tyrannosaurus Rex from the last time Ray was in the Cretaceous period. Gertie recognizes Ray’s scent and she’s pretty pissed off because when Ray was stranded in that time, he made about seventy omelets out of one of her eggs. Damn it, Ray, stop messing with the timeline! That egg you ate could have hatched into a T. Rex that became president of Dinotopia or maybe even the first T. Rex on Mars!
I’ve been really tired lately; I don’t know where my mind is going.
Speaking of minds, Sara and Jax run into Evil Ray and Regular Mick. They split up, with Sara fighting the doppelgängers and Jax continuing the search for Rip. Sara is defeated and locked in the brig, where she finds Rip cowering in a corner. He only seems to remember Evil Sara, who locked him in there in the first place. Jax, meanwhile, hears someone tapping out an S.O.S. so he runs to the source in the engine room, saying he didn’t realize Sara knew Morse Code. Seriously, who doesn’t know at least “S.O.S.”? It’s not Sara, though; it’s a woman with a familiar English-accented voice. It’s Gideon, a very human Gideon. Unlike the other people in Rip’s mind, she’s not evil or corrupted because it didn’t occur to Thawne that he would need to have a corrupted Gideon in Rip’s mind. Still, why is Gideon a flesh-and-blood woman in Rip’s mind?
T-minus 14 minutes.
Oh nooooooooo….
Ray leads them to his old camp and goes out hunting for food, only to come back just in time to interrupt some shenanigans between Nate and Amaya. Later that night, Amaya leaves camp to get some more firewood, giving Ray and Nate an opportunity to talk. Seems Ray already knows about Amaya and Nate.
RAY: “Why do you think I yelled ‘yoo-hoo’ when I came back to camp?”
NATE: “Because you’re the type of guy who still says ‘in a jiffy’.”
RAY: “Because I didn’t want to interrupt any shenanigans.”
NATE: “And still says ‘shenanigans’.”
Pfft, who does say that? *cough*
Anyway, Ray is concerned about Amaya’s granddaughter, Mari – the modern-day Vixen. He reminds Nate that Amaya already has a destiny and it’s dangerous to mess with that. Even if her future is to have her village destroyed and her granddaughter put in foster care. Yikes, I didn’t even think about that before. By the way, if you’re confused about who Mari is, she made a live-action appearance on Episode 4×15 of Arrow and has her own animated series that’s actually set in the same universe. I haven’t watched it yet, but I’ve heard good things. And Mari was awesome on Arrow.
Sara tries to remind Rip of who he is and gets thrown across the brig for her trouble – seems Rip has Force powers in his own mind. Guess he was hanging around George a little too long. Sara wants him to use that to open the door since this is his mind and he makes the rules. After a brief pep talk, Rip gives it a try, but he fails to open the cell. Luckily Jax and Gideon come in to save the day. Sara thinks Gideon is hot. Sara, there’s a time and a place…but agreed. As soon as the cell is opened, Rip hugs Gideon which…yeah…
Gideon tells them that in order to free Rip’s mind from the trap he’s in, they have to remind him of who he really is. The best way to do that is to take him to his office, where there are items from Rip’s life. They head there, but are cut off by Evil Sara and Evil Firestorm. Jax manages to flush Evil Firestorm out the cargo bay door and Sara snaps Evil Sara’s neck. I’d hate to be a counselor for superheroes, because that’s pretty fucked up and might require a lot of therapy sessions.
Team Jurassic Park find the time delineator…but it’s in the middle of Gertrude’s nest. Each do their “I’ll be the selfless hero who goes to retrieve the thing” spiel, but Ray ends up going after it alone…without the Atom suit. Does he keep forgetting he has that thing or what? It’s fine, though; he manages to get the time thingamajig and return to Nate and Amaya a scene later. But Gertie followed him, so a confrontation is in order. Nate steels up to attack, but Amaya pushes past the nerdbros and uses her totem to take on the spirit of a T. Rex and calm Gertrude. Can she do that? Does the totem work with dinosaurs? Eh, don’t care. Amaya stared down a T. Rex and it was badass as all hell.
Sara and Jax run to the bridge to meet up with Rip and Gideon, but Evil Firestorm, Evil Ray, and Still Just Mick are there waiting for them. Seems only Rip can get rid of the doppelgängers. Rip, who seems to be in his right mind again, dispatches all of them with Force Push. The Waverider in Rip’s mind starts to fall apart, since Rip’s mind was the only thing keeping the prison in place. Jax and Sara return to the real world, leaving Rip behind with Gideon. Rip thanks her for being there with him in the mental prison and for being his constant companion all those years on the ship. He knows she’s not real in this form, and that he has to let her go in order to return to the real world.
Wait, is this what the countdown was for?
3…2…1…
They kiss.
I fucking called it!! Okay, not in any review or tweet or whatever but I’ve suspected that Rip’s relationship with Gideon goes deeper than just Captain and A.I. or friends. You could hear it in any one-on-one conversation they had with each other, whether it was in Season One or this season when Gideon was telling “Phil” what kind of person Rip Hunter was. I really want them to explore Gideon’s personality more – maybe not so much a Rip/Gideon romance because…weird…but she’s obviously got some measure of free will and personality. She jokes, she makes snide remarks, she gets offended, she cares about her crew, she has a measure of self-preservation, and she has an intense loyalty to her Captain. She’s not just the Waverider’s version of Siri, so what exactly is she? There’s a lot of potential character growth there for her and I hope this isn’t the extent of it.
Rip wakes up and he’s back to his old self. Ray completes repairs to the ship and Amaya invites Nate to come to her quarters later. Ray apologizes to Nate about telling him not to get involved with Amaya, saying he’s sure the two of them can keep things safe and casual. The incident with the T. Rex has shown Nate that he really cares about Amaya and he doesn’t think he can keep things casual, so he resolves to break it off…tomorrow.
Rip remembers everything – his time before he left the Waverider, his time as Phil, and his time in the Legion Of Doom. He apologizes to Sara for trying to kill her. Gideon tells the captain that repairs are complete and there’s some confusion between Rip and Sara as to which “Captain” she’s addressing. Oh yeah…wonder if that’s going to be an issue. As Sara heads to the bridge, Rip stays behind and apologizes to Gideon for everything he’s put her through. She asks if he means overriding her and crashing the ship or the kiss, indicating there was some link between Rip’s subconscious Gideon and the real Gideon. She says she enjoyed the kiss (seriously, give us more Gideon development!) and Rip says he did too.
On the bridge, Rip greets his teammates and there’s some unspoken reconciliation and tension as they welcome him back. Sara asks if he knows where the final piece of the Spear Of Destiny is, and Rip says he does.
At NASA Flight Operations in 1970, astronaut Jack Swigert is receiving a physical from Doctor Angry Helicopter Noises.
This one was all right. Unfortunately, not a lot was done with the prehistoric setting of the episode, but since that was the B-plot I guess that’s okay. The A-plot is just…odd. Given the things Rip has faced in his past, it’s odd that his mental prison is the Waverider. I would think his own personal hell would be reliving the death of his family over and over, but instead it’s being trapped on his own ship with his friends and allies serving as his jailers. It’s not bad, just maybe a little disappointing in scope.
I already talked about Gideon, but something I didn’t realize until after watching the episode again was the significance of Rip thanking Gideon for being there with him in the prison, as well as that hug when she and Jax set Rip and Sara free. For as broken as his memories are, Rip still recognizes Gideon and has quite a bit of affection for her. I guess they’d interacted a lot in the mind prison and she was one of the few things keeping Rip Rip. It works, and it’s actually kind of sweet.
As for the kiss…eh, still a better love story than Twilight.
I’m glad Ray brought up Amaya’s future and how she’s related to Mari, because I had honestly forgotten. It does throw a pretty big wrench into the Nate/Amaya relationship and makes for a better relationship drama than what we got with Ray and Kendra last season. I’m honestly wondering where they’re going with all of this. Will Nate turn out to be Mari’s grandfather? That would be weird.
“That would be weird”, says the reviewer who just talked about the benefits of Rip Hunter being in love with his ship. Whatever. Next time: we’re going to the moon! Oh, it’s Apollo 13…maybe not.
Legends Of Tomorrow airs Tuesdays on the CW at 9 ET/8 CT. Kate can be reached on Twitter @WearyKatie.