'Legends of Tomorrow' Recap: 'Prison Break' 2.0
Well, that wasn’t quite the Rocky 4 ending that Mick was hoping for, but the daring assault on a Soviet gulag prison and an honest-to-goodness prison break by the stars of Prison Break make for a fun episode of Legends of Tomorrow.
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The Plot
Stein is interrogated by his Russian captors, but refuses to break until they begin torturing his fellow teammates, Ray and Mick. The rest of a team hook up with the Russian mafia to sneak in, but Leonard and Sara aren’t enough to get everyone out. If Dr. Vostok (Stephanie Corneliussen) and Vandal Savage crack Stein’s formula, they will create an army of Firestorms that devastate the world in 2016, so Rip tells Sara to kill Stein if they can’t extract him. Eventually, all of the reserves are called in and Kendra, Jax, and Rip turn the tide, allowing everyone to escape and blow up the lab containing the research. Chronos catches up to them in the Temporal Zone and forces them to crash-land in the Star City of 2046.
Leonard and Sara
Rip tried to put together Kendra and Sara to help tame the Lazarus Pit bloodlust, but it seems like Captain Cold is doing a much better job of speaking to that part of her. Tasked with killing Dr. Stein to prevent a future Firestorm-pocalypse, he talks her down. “That’s how a killer thinks and that’s not you anymore.” It sounds a lot more meaningful coming from a hardened criminal than it does coming from a barista.
Mick and Ray
Ray sticking his neck out for Mick brings them closer together — so much so that he’s willing to carry his unconscious body out of the prison. But that’s part of his code: Never leave a man behind. How much of an effect does Ray have beyond that, though? “There must be something you’re willing to die for,” says Ray. “The perfect score,” responds Mick, like you’d expect. But clearly neither he nor Leonard have ever had anything greater to fight for besides friends and family. Now that they do, will one of them learn the value of altruism before the other? And will that lead to a Cold/Heat split?
Rip and Vandal
More and more, it seems like Rip is absolutely not the man for the job. First, he wasn’t protective enough of his team and Hawkman died; then, he was over-protective and nearly lost more people because he was afraid he’d get more killed. He keeps taunting Vandal Savage, which makes it more and more inevitable that he will kill Rip’s family in the future. If your commute were constantly ruined by this one guy in a green Jaguar who ran you off the road every morning, you might not want to murder that guy’s family. But imagine it kept happening for 4000 years — you’d start to have sympathy for the guy, right?
Inside Comics Moment
That’s not Oliver Queen in the Green Arrow outfit at the end of the episode — that’s Connor Hawke. In the comics, he’s Oliver’s son and not the young William who’s on Arrow currently. Apparently, the Queen seed was spread quite liberally around Starling City. His mother is half-black, half-Korean; though, in the comics, he goes from looking very Asian to somewhat bi-racial to almost Irish depending on the artist. The actor Joseph David-Jones is decidedly African-American.
Legendary Thoughts
* Man, Gideon is just awful with predicting the odds, isn’t she? A 99 percent chance of the Soviet Firestorm future? It seems like every week, it’s one 99 percent doomsday prediction or another. How about next time just saying, “Things look bad. Real bad. Like Kanye tweeting bad.”?
* No matter how ludicrous the premise, it is always acceptable to have a guest spot from Carlos Valdes, aka Cisco from The Flash. Earth-1 Cisco, Reverb Cisco, and now a Russian hallucination Cisco? Think of the action figure possibilities!
* Mick doesn’t get to beat up his torturer like Rocky does in Rocky 4 and he doesn’t get to kill him like he promises. But he does get to lock him in a cell with a guy who looks like he’s going to do all the things Heat Wave wishes he could do to him. That’s how Rocky 5 ended, right?
* Line of the Night: “More drinking, less feeling.” Proof positive that this show is basically Cougar Town but with lasers.
* Backhanded Compliment of the Night: “Having merged with an insane Russian scientist, I now know how lucky I am to have you as my partner.” Thanks, Dr. Stein. Pretty sure that, given the choice, insane Russian scientist is at the bottom of all of our lists.
Legends of Tomorrow airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. on The CW.
