Legends of Tomorrow Season 2 Episode 17: Aruba/Season Finale Recap

This episode, the Legends prove once again why they’re legends, not heroes, as they take on the Legion of Doom to restore reality and destroy the Spear of Destiny, with decidedly mixed results. The only relatively permanent death is the one person Barry Allen has been trying to kill for three seasons. Sara Lance proved her prowess as a strategist by finally taking out the Reverse Flash and disabling the Spear in one fell swoop. It’s just that there were a few issues about the way the Legends got her to that point…

Picking up where we left off last episode, Rip apparently doesn’t realize that he’s been miniaturized. You’d think Gideon would have known. Was she sweet enough to keep it from him so as not to demoralize him even further? They don’t let being a few inches tall slow them down though, and speed away, out the nearest open window to find the rest of the Legends.

The Legends are looking for a signal from Rip, using a radio that Ray built. Nate pouts over Amaya in the corner, having realized that his feelings for her were deeper than he’d admitted. Ray and Jax hear Rip’s radio call, explaining that he has a small problem, just as the mini-Waverider flies into the basement. Mick is the two year old in all of us, as he grabs the ship to make faces at mini-Rip through the windshield. They quickly make a plan to find Ray’s suit at Star Labs and un-shrink the ship and Rip. I was really hoping the Honey, I Shrunk the Time Master part of the show would take a little longer. But, it’s not to be.

The team effortlessly finds the suit. Ray has a romantic moment with his helmet when they’re reunited, which creeps Jax out, and gives Damien time to find them.  He’s thrilled to see them, as always, and fully appreciates the opportunity to not only kill the Legends, but to fight mini-Rip and the mini-Waverider. Mick knocks Damien out long enough for Ray to return Rip and the ship back to their normal sizes. Then it’s off to 1916 to resteal the intact Spear and blood of Christ.

Rip reminds us that the Legends are breaking the most sacred rule of time travel: don’t revisit events in which you’ve already participated. But, just as time changes take a while to become fixed, so do reality changes. They can help mitigate the time paradox by avoiding their past selves. Their current selves are time aberrations that will disappear once the mission is over. Mick thinks Aruba continues to sound like a better plan, as it has for much of the season. It is a magical place. 😉

The first order of business is to send tiny Ray out to find the blood of Christ in the middle of the battlefield. He digs it up, takes it out of its nice, safe, padded metal box, and stands there holding the 1,000 year old glass bottle of blood. Shockingly, Eobard has predicted their plans, speeds up, grabs the bottle, and smashes it between his gloved fingers. Worst. MacGuffin. Ever. Other than nightblood on The 100, but that’s another story. No wonder the vampires are dying out on this network, blood is so rare and easily destroyed.

Ray continues to stand still and watch Eobard, despite Sara screaming for him to get away. Eobard gives in to the wishes of the rest of the Legion, and rips Ray’s heart out. He uses that method, rather than his usual vibrating hand through the heart, for maximum shock value when killing a series regular. This is the doomed duplicate Ray, though, so not to worry.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 commercial! Are we hooked on a feelin’ and high on believin’?

Back at the Waverider, Mick points out that Ray was doomed anyway, prompting the team out of their depression and into forming a plan to steal the Spear and get it out of 1916. Mick is intrigued by the idea of stealing something from himself. Nate finally gets to ditch the flashback wig.

Eobard meets with the rest of the Legion from 1916 and warns them about the duplicate Legends. They are so sick of his high-handed antics.

Nate, Mick and Rip prepare to infiltrate the 1916 Waverider to steal the Spear. Mick calls Nate “Pretty” when he takes charge of the op. Is that a Prison Break reference? They run into original Sara on their way onto the ship and almost blow their cover. Mick goes to get the Spear while Nate distracts the original Legends and Rip disables Gideon. It goes great, until Nate can’t bring himself to leave Amaya again, leaving time for their originals to approach the ship.

Duplicate Sara and Jax try to draw the approaching originals away from the ship so that the thieves can escape, but the originals become suspicious. The original Legends that are left on the ship also begin to question things, so og Sara contacts og Ray, who’s standing in front of duplicate Sara. Oops. Legend on Legend violence ensues. It was really OTT for Nate to use a steel punch on Sara. Once Sara’s unconscious, they realize she’s not an imposter, but still gather all of the Legends together on the original Waverider. Cue the time quakes.

Sara, who has just ordered that all of the Legends be brought together, demands to know whose bright idea this mission was. Yep, hers. Yep, they still need Rip. He’s her best second in command and time adviser. The future Legends explain that the Legion ended up with the Spear the first time around, terrible things happened, some people ended up dead, and now they need a do-over.

The Saras go to their room to think. They’re both still afraid to be the one to use the Spear, thinking that their troubled past will taint the reality they create somehow.

Future Nate follows original Nate into the parlor. He warns Nate to accept his feelings for Amaya and to tell her how he feels, before it’s to late.

The Legion attacks the Waverider, causing the Legends to try to make a time jump. Trying to jump with both sets of Legends on board creates a time storm and crashes the ship. Rip argued against the jump, but Sara overruled him. They could have just flown away to somewhere else in 1916, dropped off the future Legends, then jumped and used the Spear to repair reality. Sara could stand to listen to Rip’s less impulsive plans sometimes, or come up with something in between the two ideas.

The Waverider is now too damaged to operate. Future Sara decides that she and her team will help the originals get the Spear to the second Waverider, but won’t go any further with them. They all fight their way past the Legion.

Firestorm is shot out of the sky and separated. Both Jaxes are shot with Malcom’s arrows, duplicate Jax fatally so. Stein has a hard time leaving him. Original Jax has to pull him away after taking down Malcom. It’s nice to see that level of devotion from Stein toward Jax, but he was probably having flashbacks to losing Ronnie, too. I hope they continue to explore the emotional side of their partnership next season.

When Mick corners Damien at gunpoint, Len tells him to listen to his partner and let Damien go. Mick says he doesn’t have a partner, he has a team. Len kills Mick with an icicle through the heart, the same way he killed his murderously abusive father on The Flash.

I simply don’t believe that Len would ever have done that to Mick. The original Len we saw on The Flash never treated Mick this badly. This is the guy who told Mick “Safety first” and made him wear his seatbelt in one of their first appearances. This is the guy who’s been Mick’s partner for 30 years, since they were kids. If he was going to be capable of killing Mick, it would have been after the job that caused their break up the year before The Flash started, when Mick lost control, ruined the job, and got himself arrested and badly burned. Not to protect Damien Darhk, who Len barely knows. Len wouldn’t bother to go that far out of his way for a near stranger who’s also competition. He’d temporarily disable Mick again, but not kill him.

Ray is nearby when duplicate Mick dies, and screams out to him, preparing to fire on Len. Len is the quicker draw, but original Mick is even faster, firing his heat gun at Len. Ray is ecstatic to see that one of the Micks is still alive. Mick invokes a strict “no hugging” policy. So, the Ray/Mick partnership that’s been off and on for two seasons is solidified, and the Mick/Len partnership appears to be permanently broken.

Damien stabs original Nate, then gets in a fight with original Sara. She ends up holding a knife to his throat. He tells her to finish it, because he’s nothing if not hardcore. Those two have some pretty amazing chemistry together. She tells him death would be too kind. Duplicate Sara knocks him out with a punch to the jaw. They tell everyone to get to the ship now, while the Legion members are all out of commission.

Amaya’s saying goodbye to duplicate Nate. He tells original Nate not to screw it up.

The Legends gather together with the Spear on the battlefield. Reverse Flash arrives with about 50 of his own time remnants as back up. He attacks duplicate Rip as he flashes by. Eobard threatens the Legends, then attacks. Sara needs to use the Spear, but she hesitates. The others tell her it’s her destiny. She begins the incantation.

Then she finds herself in her sister Laurel’s living room. Laurel is there, with wine. She guides Sara through her decision on how to use the Spear.

As Sara finishes, Eobard grabs the Spear. He begins the incantation, intending to kill the Legends for good this time, but it fails to glow the way it does when it powers up. Sara changed reality by telling the Spear to depower itself, and called the Black Flash to kill Eobard. Black Flash speeds in and disintegrates him. Then it growls in poor Sara’s face by way of thanks, or maybe it gives her a warning from the speed force to stop breaking time rules. Non-verbal messages from faceless speedsters can be hard to interpret.

Duplicate Sara vanishes, but Legends never die.

The Legends return the Legion members to the places in time that Eobard removed them from, and wipe their memories. Mick takes Len back to 2014 and tells him that joining the Legends made both of them better people, even though it led to Len sacrificing himself. Are enough memories going to trickle through to his conscious mind that he’ll make some kind of change this time around, and we’ll end up with a present day version of Len that didn’t sacrifice himself? A Len that found a way to destroy the Oculus without anyone having to die, since he knew it was coming?

Sara takes Damien back to 1987, where he gets to dress in his Miami Vice best. He reminds her that if she leaves him alive, he’ll eventually kill her sister. She tells him that she and Laurel are okay with leaving the timeline the way it’s meant to be. Damien is confused, then she wipes him.

Amaya is packing her ruby slippers, because she wants to go home to 1942. Nate tells her that he wants to go with her. He doesn’t want them to ever be apart again. She decides that she doesn’t want to leave after all. They can have adventures through time before she goes back to meet her destiny.

Rip has packed his things and is trying to slip off the ship unnoticed. Sara finds him and asks what he’s doing. He says that he doesn’t have a place on the ship any more. They function better without him. (Not true.) He wants to steal borrow the jump ship and strike off on his own. Sara gives him permission to leave.

Watching this a second time, I noticed that the jump ship sounds really terrible and its course is all over the place. Pretty sure Rip’s in trouble, too.

Sara tells Mick that he can pick their next destination. He picks Aruba, 2017. As soon as they set off, the ship goes out of control, bouncing and crashing all over the place. Stein blames Mick’s navigation. Freakin’ crotchety old man.

They’re thrown out of the temporal zone by the storm. The Waverider crash lands again, this time in what’s supposed to be Los Angeles, 2017. Except, it’s a mishmash of dinosaurs and buildings from different places and eras, from centuries past to sometime in the future. Sara says, “Guys, I think we broke time.”

You think?

At least they already have experience with taming dinosaurs.

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The Reverse Flash is gone, but he was a time remnant, and, as he himself showed us this episode, there’s always more of those where he came from. Someone can go and pluck another version of him from another point in his history to serve as part of the Legion, or one can escape on his own.

It sounds like Amaya might die young once she goes back to her own timeline, so she might as well stay with the Legends as long as possible. She could even freeze some eggs and/or embryos so that she wouldn’t have to worry about getting too old to conceive her daughter before she goes back. The Waverider could drop her off in 1942, then immediately jump forward to give her the fertility treatments necessary to conceive Mari’s mother, whenever that’s supposed to happen.

I doubt Rip is really gone. Not when some of his parting words were that he had nothing left to teach Sara and the Legends. Not when Time is now a complete and utter mess that needs someone like the only remaining Time Master to fix it. Chronos probably didn’t have the training to deal with this level of clusterf*ck.

The beginning of the season will be another search for Rip. How will they even navigate through this mess to find him? What happened to him and the jump ship? He must have realized that things were terribly wrong as soon as he tried to jump, as well. He may get his own storyline as he tries to get back to the Waverider to help fix Time.

Think about it. Rip could be anywhere and anywhen, in any jumbled mess of time. At the bottom of the ocean with giant prehistoric creatures, nuclear submarines and a future colony of humans. In the Ice Age with sabre tooth cats, wooly mammoths, and neanderthals, mixed in with Roman Centurions, and futuristic flying cars. A cowboys, aliens, and dinosaurs version of the Old West with his long lost lover, Jonah Hex. I’d watch any of those movies. The real question is, will it be Rip Hunter, damsel in distress, saved by the Legends, again, or will he realize what’s happened, know what to do, and fight his way back to the Waverider with a plan of action to save Time and the Legends, this time around, proving to himself and everyone else that he has a place on the team that only he can fill?

My fingers and toes are crossed that whatever they did to Time somehow made it possible to bring back the heroic Leonard Snart who sacrificed himself to the Oculus. The Oculus was responsible for guarding/predicting the “true” timeline. Sure could be helpful to have something like that around as you’re trying to fix Time, or maybe a being who’s a fusion of Len and the Oculus. It was probably not a coincidence that we went back to the Vanishing Point and the Oculus Wellspring at the end of this season. He could come back as a full-fledged member of the team, but since Mick has transferred his loyalty to the team and Ray, they might not want to bring back his partner as a regular crew member. They might be more likely to bring him back to recur, similar to this season, but as one, real, character. He could be a figure like Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation, a god-like trickster who isn’t human, but takes that form, and likes to pop in and out to play games with the humans. It wouldn’t actually be that different from what Captain Cold ended up being on The Flash. OcuLen could show up to “help” several times a season, or every week, and I’d be happy.

I’m so, so, so happy that Damien and Malcom are alive (ish, in Damien’s case) to come back and form the Legions again. It’s sad that Damien can’t remember all of the fun he’s had this season, though. OcuLen, Damien, and Malcom, without the Reverse Flash, could have a riot as time pirates who help the Legends when it’s in their best interests, and commit nonlethal crimes in the meantime. Captain Jack Malcom can be the ringleader, since he’s already half pirate, and he’s been playing both sides, depending on his momentary goals, for years. Maybe they could even dig up a couple of female villains to join them, like Damien’s wife Ruvé.

Grade for the season= B+