Episode 12: Too Legit to Quit

Leave a comment

February 27, 2022 by Meghan J

(aired 2-23)

Everyone converges on the medbay, where Ava, still with an arm in a sling, and Gary have brought Human Gideon. They unanimously come to the decision that rebooting Evil Gideon is the only move, with Zari asserting,

“We shut her down once, we can do it again!”

 

But Evil Gideon comes down hard immediately, killing the ship’s oxygen. For her part, an on-the-edge of-consciousness Human Gideon has been mumbling the name of a certain protocol, and as they’re all struggling to breathe, Astra blurts it out.

It’s a protocol for this very situation—an in-immediate-danger Gideon system. The oxygen returns, and Evil Gideon gets to work healing her human self. And apparently, because the Legends are actively helping Human Gideon, the protocol prevents EG from harming them, too.

But she can still fight back. She seals the medbay doors, trapping the whole team in there—meaning they can’t shut her down again.

GWYN: “It seems we’ve reached a stalemate.”

 

But the Legends have still more tricks up their sleeve. When rebooting EG, Zari did some tinkering so that a room besides the bathroom will be invisible to Evil Gideon: the lab. So Gideon escorts them all there, and they can still talk and plan. (Question: Can they not just go back into the di-mansion?)

Not that it matters, because they end up needing to be on the ship anyway.

Gideon talks to…herself and manages to come up with a deal. If the Legends agree to retire, EG will spare them, since they’ll no longer be endangering the timeline.

But they aren’t about to hand over control of the timeline to Evil Gideon! Plus, they won’t just take EG at her word that she won’t still kill them.

So while Gideon, with Gary, is on the bridge schmoozing EG, the rest of them come up with a plan of their own.

Nate has hung onto the time-courier that failed to work at the beginning of the season. If someone can get it, undetected, to the charging station on the other side of the ship, they can blow this Wave Rider, use the courier to get away, and start from scratch. Spooner’s small enough to squeeze through the ship’s ducts, so she volunteers as tribute.

But then Gideon and Gary return, with an update to the retirement suggestion.

“To demonstrate her commitment to your safety, Computer Gideon will show you glimpses of your futures, as proof that you and the timeline are in good hands.”

 

In an effort to secure themselves maximum time—and, seemingly, reluctant to reveal to Human Gideon and her boo that they have a plan that involves destroying EG for good—they play along. (I think they should’ve called this episode “The Legends of Tomorrow’s Tomorrows.”)

They go one (or two) at a time, so let’s highlight-reel this thing!

–Behrad is a children’s TV star/musician and provides a nice guitar-serenade original for the montage of the “futures.”
-Nate is a successful author writing history tell-alls; Astra is running in a presidential primary.
–Zari wins an “Influencer of the Decade” award, but her totem is nowhere to be seen.
-Gwyn is living a peaceful life in Wales, but he’s alone.
-Finally, Sara and Ava have a tween-age daughter who’s sending them love from summer camp—the same camp from “Wet Hot American Bummer”!

But soon, it’s Spooner’s turn and she’s not even close to being done with her ad-VENT-ure. So Astra glamour-spells it up and impersonates Spooner. Turns out Spooner returns to 1925 and helps Gloria found a successful apothecary…but without access to time travel, she wouldn’t be able to see any of the other Legends anymore.

Meanwhile, Real Spooner makes her way through the vents and goes to put the courier on the charger…and alarms blare throughout the ship. EG shuts the door of the room she’s in and opens the airlock. Spooner clings to a safety strap, but it’s looking ready to give when Astra runs up and threatens to blow open the door, sending all of them—including Human Gideon—out into the time-stream as well.

The protocol wins out and EG shuts the airlock, but not before EG spills the beans that the Legends never meant to do things Human Gideon’s way, and went behind her back.

The captains and the Gideons then go back and forth a bit. Human Gideon’s not saying that EG’s actions were right, but…the Legends are a little loosey-goosey with history, and hasn’t going home been what they’ve been trying to do this entire season?! As a compromise, she makes an offer: She’ll be the human captain on this Wave Rider, keeping Evil Gideon in check.

ZARI: “Is [this] the right thing? We’re just gonna stop being Legends?” SARA: “For the timeline, I think it is.”

 

So it’s a unanim-ish decision. Human Gideon takes the Time Master’s Oath, and we get a montage of the Legends having a goodbye party for…them all. (Is Gary planning to stay with Gideon?) (Gideons?)

Astra even whips up a duplication spell so there are now ten versions of the di-mansion key—they can all still see each other no matter when they are!

Yes, Gideon asks Gary to stay with her, and Behrad and Astra agree to give long-distance a shot (since he’s returning to the 2040s). Zari reveals to Nate that she’s not thrilled about the version of her future she saw. It used to be everything she wanted, but not anymore. Nate reminds her what a good person she naturally is—think “Speakeasy Does It”—no matter what it is she’s remembered for.

And then Gwyn tells Ava that his future doesn’t involve Alun after all. (Ava acts like this is a deal-breaking surprise for this whole retirement thing, but they never saved his life in the first place, so…how could it have?!) Ava and Zari do some conspiring leading Zari to a brain blast—the bathroom has a charger (“Spoons can never find out about this,” LOL). They zap the courier and tell Gwyn they’re going to save Alun. (Finally!!!)

But before they can jump headfirst into a gnarly WWI bombing, Human Gideon appears behind them…with Alun. She took the liberty of saving him herself, via the jump-ship.

Things seem to be going swimmingly—Alun is totally down with Gwyn having invented time travel and downright flattered that he used it to save him. He even reveals that he’s always had feelings for him too. But when Gwyn starts to recite a saying that Alun said to him all the time, and Alun can’t remember the end of it…well, Gwyn is seemingly so overjoyed that he doesn’t think much of it. BUT I DO! RED FLAG!

There’s then a very cool, poignant, and kinda haunting gimmick where the Legends (and Alun) take a group photo and wisp, one by one, out of the freeze-frame until only Gideon and Gary are left.

We flash forward an undisclosed, but presumably not too long, amount of time as Gideon and Gary are getting used to their new life as Time Masters. Gideon tells a fib about Gary’s cooking, they work it out, and Gary tells her to pretty please not lie. And that leads her to blurt out a confession.

“Alun is a robot! I went back to 1916, harvested his DNA, and printed a robot Alun. Then I used Gwyn’s diaries from the historical records to recreate his personality.”

 

She reveals that she overheard Ava and Zari planning to save Alun and discovered that Alun’s death was a fixed point. (Possibly because it led to the invention of time travel?) Bot-cloning Alun was “the only thing I could do to keep the Legends and the timeline safe,” she says.

Gary takes some time for himself, hemming and hawing about such a twisty moral dilemma. But he eventually decides he loves Gideon and wants to help her figure out those dilemmas together.

She’s no longer on the bridge, so Gary asks Evil Gideon where she is. EG tells him she’s in the cargo bay.

But when Gary arrives, there’s no Gideon. EG seals the door and opens the airlock, and whoosh goes Gary.

EG tells Human Gideon that Gary has left the ship, manipulatingly hinting that he left her, left. Human Gideon says this is for the best.

Gwyn brings “Alun” into the di-mansion and leans in as if to kiss him…and yanks out his CPU. So he did catch on! (Also, snaps for the writers for including the scene in the previous episode where Sara-bot and Nate-bot took out their own CPUs in front of him, so that he knew how it worked!)

He promises that he’s going to save the real Alun, and the time machine’s in the di-mansion, so he still has it.

(But. Not. The. Colander.)

THOUGHTS:

Man, the second episode-ending fakeout death in as many episodes! (I say “fakeout” with some measure of confidence cause I can’t imagine they’d actually write Gary off that way?!)

I knew Gwyn saving Alun was going to be a big deal in the final arc of this season! Will he succeed? Hard to say! This is giving me much smaller-scale vibes of Season 3’s season-ending arc of Amaya trying to save Zambesi, and that change stuck!

PROMOTIONAL MATERIAL STRIKES AGAIN:

So from both online episode review headlines and a friend who watched this episode before I did, I was expecting this episode to have series finale vibes. And I see what was meant by that, but I definitely didn’t feel like this was even close to series finale material. Because of those expectations, I honestly thought the “what-if” future scenarios were going to be much longer and comprise a major chunk of the episode, but that wasn’t the case at all. (Like, my “highlight reel” actually kinda covered it all.)

As I’ve said before, I am 1000% not a television writer—but if I was going to end this series, an Evil Gideon forced-redemption-arc and a lesser-of-two-evils mass retirement would not be the way I’d do it! They were never going to just coexist with Evil Gideon, or let her take over their role monitoring the timeline! Of course, they dispelled any notions of that redemption with the Gary twist (and, of course, this is not actually a series finale), but still.

While the Legends’ abrupt retirements and varyingly-satisfying future visions were bittersweet enough that you weren’t rooting for their retirement, I do like that they presented that some of the Legends actually could make really concrete, positive changes if they left the ship (Spooner with her apothecary in particular). So much of the premise of this show has been that the Legends would be nobodies and misfits in the “real world,” so it was nice to have a little ambiguity that they could also make a positive difference if they left the ship and so maybe should take that route. I wish we actually got to see Spooner herself react to her potential future!

And then there’s Gideon’s arc in this episode (Human Gideon), namely how she…sided with Evil Gideon, like, a bunch. It’s certainly complicated! It does make sense that she was defensive of Evil Gideon—especially since EG was corrupted, by Bishop, to be that way—but she didn’t raise any qualms during the last couple episodes, when shutting down Evil Gideon was still their plan. (In fact, the Fixed Point shenanigans were her plan, to set a trap so they could retake the Evil Wave Rider!) Now all of a sudden she was undermining the Legends in favor of EG, after all of the events of this season? (To be fair, though, they did lie to her as well.)

There were also some really sweet pairing scenes that built off the events of this season: Gideon and Gary; Gwyn and Ava; Zari and Nate, fully platonic again. (The warped trailer audio confused me; we did not get OG Zari.) (How does she feel about the Legends’ retirement? I would 100000% consider her still a Legend, and she didn’t get a say!)

FINAL THOUGHT:

Quite possibly what felt like the most series finale–y moment to me was this LOL-worthy one at the beginning:

NATE: “Legends don’t retire.” EVERYONE CHIMING IN: “Well, except for Ray. And Nora. And Amaya, and Jax, and Wally…” “Mona.” “Charlie.” “And Mick.” “Oh, don’t forget the Hawk-people.” NATE: “Okay, Legends don’t retire in bulk!”

 

It honestly was just delightful to see them run through the whole gang like that (omitting the Legends who died, of course. And John. Who…did sort of die).

NEXT EPISODE: “Knocked Down, Knocked Up”

Good Lord, who is pregnant NOW!?!?!?!?!

*watches trailer*

Is Human Gideon evil now?! Or is this just her processing the lie about Gary? (Okay, wait, no, looks like Evil Gideon just gets a human body.) Ooh, Gwyn anachronistically dying must be what brings the other Legends back into the fold. Also, “It’s the end of the road”? C’mon, stop messing with us!