UK TV recap: Legends of Tomorrow Season 3, Episode 5
Review Overview
Mallus
5Darhk-ness
7Mick the Vampire Slayer
8Matthew Turner | On 18, Nov 2017
Warning: This contains spoilers. For how to watch Legends of Tomorrow, click here.
After the standalone fun and frolics of the show’s E.T. homage, Legends of Tomorrow kick-starts the over-arching plot for the rest of the season this episode, with a solid, if slightly underwhelming chapter that sees the screw-up super-team heading to Victorian London and encountering a familiar face.
The episode begins in very promising fashion with Rip Hunter doing his best Sherlock Holmes impression in 1895 London and stumbling upon what appears to be evidence of a vampire attack (victim, puncture wounds in neck, etc.). Shortly afterwards, the Legends make their own way to Victorian London when Nate discovers a pattern in the list of anomalies that suggests something in the city requires their attention.
After an encounter with a coroner who turns out to have a souped-up watch from 2017, the team head to a nearby graveyard on what they think is a vampire hunt and discover Rip digging around in an open grave. He tells the Legends that he’s gone rogue and the Time Bureau don’t know what he’s up to, and also that he needs their help. Rip had told Agent Sharpe in a previous episode that he would need the Legends in the fight against Mallus and now he clues them in, telling them that he’s been pursuing whispers of “an ancient evil” for the past five years. Oddly, he pronounces it “Mollus”, which might be just so that Nate can get in a joke about molluscs, or it might be that no one has quite agreed on the correct pronunciation yet. At any rate, Rip suspects that the vampire activity isn’t vampire-related, but has something to do with the season’s Big Bad.
The team decide to use Nate as vampire bait (he can make his neck unbiteable, after all) and send him out to wander around in a London park at night, whereupon he promptly gets kidnapped by a man who looks exactly like Martin. It’s probably best not to read too much into that. Anyway, Nate wakes up strapped to a table and it turns out that Martin is actually Martin’s ancestor, Henry Stein, an actor who’s part of a sinister Mallus-worshipping cult that collects human blood (hence the puncture wounds) for a resurrection ritual involving a body in a tank. Rip and Sara, meanwhile, rescue Nate and discover that the body in the tank is none other than Damien Darhk. Ruh-roh!
Back on the Waverider, Rip tries to persuade Sara that he needs Mallus (and, by extension, Damien) to be resurrected so that they can defeat him while he’s weak. Sara doesn’t actually say “over my dead body”, but she definitely should have done. Instead she points out that she’s the only person there who’s been resurrected and it wasn’t an improvement. (That argument might have more weight if Sara wasn’t, like, totally fine now.) Anyway, Rip is desperate to stop Mallus at any cost, so he traps the Legends aboard the Waverider using a secret override code and heads off to the resurrection ritual.
Meanwhile, while Nate, Rip and Sara have been busy vampire-hunting, Zari and Amaya have been bonding over their totems. While investigating the vampiric activity, they meet a medium named Eleanor (Courtney Fox), who appears to channel the spirit of Zari’s brother, which freaks her out no end, as she feels guilty about abandoning him to ARGUS in 2045. Later, when Zari returns to see Eleanor again, she tricks her into handing over her totem, whereupon she reveals she’s in league with the Mallus cult. (In fact – spoiler alert – she’s Damien Darhk’s daughter, according to casting information, but this episode gives no hint of that development so they’re obviously saving it for another time.) Anyway, she subdues Zari and takes her to the ritual.
As the ritual begins, Rip bursts in and opens a time-portal, letting in a handful of Time Agents. He demands to speak to Mallus, at which point Eleanor goes all Eva Green in Penny Dreadful, does a bit of convulsive shaking and channels Mallus’ voice (or rather, the voice of Fringe’s John Noble – either way, it’s a damn good voice). Mallus then invokes the ritual (involving a rather weedy looking ray of light emanating from a blood red moon) and Damien Darhk rises from the grave and immediately complains that somebody stole his watch.
A fun fight scene ensues, set to The Return of the Mack (which was also the ring-tone on the coroner’s phone), during which Rip does a cool time-stopping thing with what looks like a time grenade. Unfortunately, Darhk is immune to time grenades (or something), but just as he’s about to drain Rip’s life-force (he goes a fetching shade of purple, just like Joffrey in Game of Thrones), Sara and Amaya show up, having crashed the Waverider to escape. Zari manages to get her totem back, but Eleanor and Darhk both escape, leaving Rip looking rather sheepish at the number of Time Agent corpses lying about the place. Sara: not happy. In fact, she’s so not happy that she calls the Time Bureau and they arrive to arrest Rip. To be fair, he brought it on himself. On the plus side, in return for Rip’s arrest, the Time Bureau honchos tell Sara that the Legends are now free to travel in time with impunity. So that’s nice.
In the episode’s subplot, Ray and Jax work in secret to try and split up Firestorm by separating the psychic matrix between Jax and Stein. The comedy result of that is a spot of short-term memory loss for Jax, which leads to a few awkward moments. Stein quickly figures out what they’re up to (again, what use is their psychic bond, if it doesn’t alert him to stuff like this?) and isn’t at all happy about it, but by the end of the episode, he’s come round to the idea, as a. he misses his granddaughter (who makes another brief Skype appearance), and b. he can tell Jax is only doing it for Martin’s sake.
All in all, this is an entertaining episode that advances the plot, even if it is hard not to be a little disappointed that there are no actual vampires. The jury is still out on whether bringing Damien Darhk back so soon is a good idea or not, but hopefully the dynamic with his daughter should change things up a bit. Come back next time, when the Firestorm project results in accidental body-swap shenanigans…
Footnotes of tomorrow
– Franz Drameh’s accent work is so good as Jax that it’s easy to forget that the actor is actually British. We get a little reminder of that this episode, when he does a brief cockney copper impression during the visit to the coroner.
– We also get a strong contender for the most pointless cameo award this week, as Curtis from Arrow shows up over video-link because the watch apparently has Oliver Queen’s fingerprints on it. That makes no sense at all and has zero bearing on the plot, so perhaps it was a contractual obligation? Or maybe just a way of establishing that the Arrow Cave and the Waverider are in regular contact, in advance of the upcoming crossover?
– Mick doesn’t get a lot to do this episode, but once again, he has his own comedy subplot where he’s obsessed with vampires – he spends the whole episode reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula (even while the Waverider is crashing) and it turns out he always carries a wooden stake with him, just in case.
Legends of Tomorrow Season 3 is available on Sky 1 every Wednesday, within a week of its US broadcast. Don’t have Sky? You can stream it live or catch up on-demand through NOW, as part of a £7.99 monthly subscription, no contract. A 7-day free trial is available for new subscribers.