This Legends of Tomorrow episode review contains spoilers.
Legends of Tomorrow Season 5 Episode 4
To answer the question posed in the review summary above, no, of course Legends of Tomorrow isn’t too funny. That’s a stupid question, what is this, Slate? A show like Legends can’t be TOO funny, because it exists solely to delight its creative and professional staff and its viewers, and they do that week in and week out.
But…
So the big news coming out of “A Head of Her Time” is probably the Constantine plot. This episode continues with the team chasing down encores, this week going after Marie Antoinette in the incorrectly collapsing French Revolution, while Constantine, Charlie and Gary pal around the haunted House of Mystery as a ghost from John’s past tries to haunt him into a revelation, and Astra tries to cut a deal in Hell to get Constantine’s death moved up in the schedule a little bit.
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And it happens: Constantine picks up a clue from his dead childhood best friend (who may well be the first person he screwed over in his long and illustrious career of scumbaggery) that points to Charlie being a much bigger player in this whole scheme than we had any idea about, and then Astra succeeds in convincing the coin maker to give Constantine his lung cancer posthaste. And he coughs himself to death. As the episode closes.
This is a really big deal. Constantine’s lung cancer and the squirrely, disreputable ways he found around actually staying dead are enormous moments from the comics – this is maybe the closest Legends has hewed to a comics storyline outside of a crossover episode since…what, the JSA in season 2? The solution to the encores, Astra’s redemption and how Constantine achieves it are all part of the big arc of the season, maybe the point of it all.
Charlie’s true identity is also much more important than we’ve thought – the Loom of Fate (which I trust will not be a loom that gives assassins their hit orders) is the key to redeeming Astra, but Charlie destroyed it and scattered its parts across “the multiverse” (her words). The ability to casually stroll between vibrational planes is reserved for Flashes and very important cosmic beings, and I’m assuming Charlie isn’t a Flash.
On the other hand, Zari’s boyfriend DJ S’more Money is a man dressed as a s’more with chocolate dollar signs for eyes.
I had to stop writing for a second because I started laughing so hard I cried, and that’s just from remembering the episode. In the moment, I think I woke a couple of people in my house up shouting at the television. This is the funniest episode of Legends in a long time, and I’m picking at extremely small nits when I faintly grumble about the comedy of the episode overshadowing its importance to the season.
Marie Antoinette is using a popularity perfume to keep people in Revolutionary France partying themselves to death with her, and this is an excuse for the writers of Legends to simultaneously go deep on Zari’s new personality post-time shift and absolutely brutalize influencer culture. We get a new, brilliant pairing in Zari and Ava, as Ava’s left in charge of the mission while Sara…runs some errands? This plot line gives us constant waves of killer lines, interspersed with really subtle, clever character development.
For example: Mick, Ray and Gideon have an exchange about Mick catching feelings for Ali at their reunion last week (Gideon: “I have confirmed that you like like her”), then Zari, having overheard Ava and Sara about to fool around in the shower, flirts with Ava to try and secure a spot on the mission. And then Zari finally convinces her by talking about all the hard work she’s put in in her life – she “once played capture the flag to battle feline OCD.” Again, I’m dying just retyping this.
At the same time, the episode uses Antoinette (played by Courtney Ford and her best Kevin Costner accent) to show the real person behind Zari’s influencer shell – smart and resourceful, the same core of a Zari we grew to love over the last couple of seasons. She does eventually walk off with Antoinette’s magic popularity perfume to her own scent rollout, but it gets screwed up and the team lets her slide with it. And she ends up in a flannel shirt and jeans, eating a donut and having a flashback to the old timeline, remembering who she was.
So to circle back around to the silly question posed in the summary, no, Legends is not too funny. It’s just a show that has been since it turned in season 2, and continues to be vastly more interested in the inner workings of its characters and making them have fun than it is in rote plot propulsion. Legends isn’t too funny. It’s just really good.