It’s the one-hundredth episode spectacular, which makes sense given the litany of guest stars, but it’s also the episode where Amy Louise Pemberton becomes a proper Legend. Since the pilot, she’s been on the show, but just her voice; she’s the AI running the time-traveling spaceship. She’s appeared a few times over the years in physical form, and this episode handles transforming her from a “voice credit” to a regular one.
The episode starts with Pemberton, Olivia Swann, and Lisseth Chavez traveling 1925 Texas trying to get to New York before the rest of the team to save them. It’s unclear what will happen when they get there, but it’d be nice if they got a move on. Even though the season’s only three episodes in, they spent the end of last season in 1920s Texas, so it feels like forever. Luckily the reunion spectacular is a worthwhile stopover.
Pemberton—who might be human but still has a supercomputer’s brain and all her memories of the timeline—has a mental crash, and Swann and Chavez need to magic themselves into her brain to figure out what’s wrong. When they get there, they find themselves back on the spaceship, only it’s Pemberton’s subconscious and Franz Drameh’s running it. Drameh left in season three, so it’s been a while. He’s probably the most welcome return because he gets the most to do.
There’s also Victor Garber, Wentworth Miller, Brandon Routh, Courtney Ford, and then Arthur Darvill. Darvill, of course, was the original “lead” and hasn’t been back for years; they hinted at him last episode, but I wasn’t counting episodes, so I didn’t think they’d bring him back the very next one.
Pemberton’s journey to human-hood involves a bunch of memories of the show at various points in its run. Oh, wait, they also bring back Hawkman Falk Hentschel, who hasn’t been back since the first season and hasn’t been mentioned since because they were probably going to use Hawkman in a movie and were scared to confuse viewers back then with multiple versions of the same characters. But he’s back for a funny enough cameo.
It’s a good trip down memory lane; a clip show, but obviously better because the scenes are geared towards being memorable without having to do any work. Dominic Purcell is conspicuously absent, of course, and the eventual drama is… well, it’s not a rip-off of “WandaVision,” but they’ve definitely seen “WandaVision.”
We also get some more information on the season’s big bad—the last episode revealed they’d be robots; in this episode, we get hints at who might be building them.
Caity Lotz directs and does a fine job. She leans into the fun and silly.
It’s far from the best “Legends”—it’s like a very soft sci-fi take from hard sci-fi aficionados–but it’s a bunch of fun. Though most of the charm is going to require having seen the last seventy hours of the show.
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