Jessie Robertson reviews the fourth episode of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow season 2…
There is absolutely nothing wrong with an irrational fear of the dead rising and hunting us for our brains….
I don’t have a lot to cover this week except a broad overview of the two completely incongruent themes this week: Slavery and Zombies. Now, only a show like this (and maybe Buffy the Vampire Slayer) could get away with joining these two into the same episode, but it happened. While slavery has been a sad and long part of our culture, zombies are still relatively new (as Heywood points out, they won’t be named for another 70 years at this point) yet, they couldn’t feel any more stale than the bread General Grant’s troops were no doubt chewing on as they waited for their next move. Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s no new ground tread on the issues of slavery here; you shouldn’t expect there to be; in fact, maybe more so than any other so far, there has to be a lot of allowances for this episode to even coherently come together. A woman and man walk up on Grant’s forces, and she is called their captain and everyone’s fine with it (as Heywood also drops the trivia that many woman dressed in drag to fight in the Civil War), black women and men walk the slave master’s house with impunity as Jaxon and Amya search the house at one point, even the language that is forbidden here and violence that we know begot those times isn’t show because it’s too brutal for this show and would pull the narrative into a different direction; but we make them because this show is about popcorn entertainment…until it isn’t.
There’s a poignant moment where the slave owner chains Jaxon up, then punches him once and says he’ll back later (and strangely never returns) when he begins talking with some other slaves in the barn; they comment on how his name is comprised of two famous slave owners and Jaxon’s face sort of conveys the thought he’d never thought of his name in that regard. The whole scene is melancholy but as he describes it to Professor Stein later, who frowns and frumps at what Jaxon must be going through, he turns the glass half full and says their hope, their strength, gives him the same feeling about the human spirit, paraphrased. It’s a nice way to end the show and again, nothing new under the sun, but the show tackles it in the way they tackle things and to not just have it be zombies they fight off, but to include such a relevant piece of that time and pull it off in the best way they could, I have to give the showrunners and writers props.
The zombies on the other hand are just bad; the setup is strange and uninteresting, the zombies look like castoffs from The Walking Dead and besides giving Nate another heroic moment, there’s not a lot of purpose to including them as part of the Civil War. The only real positive it does it keeps Mick off our screen as anything but a mindless monster. After Ray and Martin have their own Halloween fright and restore Mick to his normal brooding self, in one of the strangest and most out of left field scenes, he offers Ray the cold gun of Leonard Snart, as a way to give him worth to the team. First off, really? Second, why? And third, Palmer has so much more to offer than just pulling the trigger and freezing someone; he’s a brilliant scientist, chemist and engineer; he has millions of dollars of money; it just doesn’t fit. BTW- aren’t having Firestorm and Heat Wave a bit redundant?
8/10- Some of these time sessions are going to work and some aren’t; this one gets there halfway but not because of the “zany” way the timeline gets screwed up but because this show, of all shows, takes a shot at showing one of our most shameful periods in history and while it’s not a very accurate depiction, it’s still not ignoring it either.
Jessie Robertson
Originally published November 4, 2016. Updated April 16, 2018.
