Time runs out for DC's Legends Of Tomorrow

It’s not difficult to spot the meaning behind season seven of DC’s Legends Of Tomorrow—it’s about change, making an impact on other people’s lives, turning history into a better place, come what may. Empathy, understanding, love, and kindness, that was always going to be the Legends’ true legacy. And chaos, let’s not forget about that. Too bad chaos comes as naturally to them as doing a good turn.

Whenever the Legends decide to change the timeline, which is a thing they are very much not supposed to do for important, reality-salvaging reasons, that decision often comes on a good-natured whim and it just as often ends in catastrophe. One example: Astra taking control of an airfield’s means of production in 1945 might have brought about an early jump-start in workplace equality, but it also brought the rogue Waverider down around her head and sent Bishop to an early grave. Every chance the Legends have to change a person’s life for the better, if it means altering the course of history, they take it. Damn the torpedoes. The timeline, as a result, is a shambles. Their ledger is filled with anachronisms. Love has wrought chaos, and the bill has come due.

That’s the price the Legends must pay in “Too Legit To Quit,” the penultimate episode of Legends’ seventh season—change. As the Legends later discover through the lens of Mean-Gideon’s timeline-hopping visions (call it her crystal ball; Sara does), change can be a positive thing if you let it. It can also be a destructive thing, as poor Gary finds out, or a disappointing thing, as Nate and Fancy Zari discover. This week the fates of the Legends are dangled in front of them as terms are drawn up to squash this time-spanning beef between Captain Sara’s merry band and the rogue Waverider’s cruel artificial intelligence—that means change is a-coming, whether or not the Legends, or us, are ready for it.

After last week’s showdown with their robo-doppelgängers came to a decisive, if modest, end, Gideon finds herself mortally wounded. (Stabbed in the back by a Hell-scorched robo-Astra, the twisted, hateful image of her “mother” being the last thing Gideon sees before the lights went out.) This puts Mean-Gideon in a strange quandary: According to Protocol 276, a bit of necessary plot gibberish that serves as an unbreakable boundary for this series’ nigh-omnipotent AI villain, under no circumstances may a Gideon artificial intelligence self-destruct. Letting Gideon die is against Mean-Gideon’s programming, and so long as she lives, the Legends live. What’s a mortal nemesis to do?

It’s a stalemate episode for DC’s Legends Of Tomorrow, one that gives each character a moment to reflect on what they want for their friends, what they want for the timeline, and what they want for themselves. Hovering in the quiet hum of the temporal zone, a revived Gideon faces off with a holo-projection of herself, searching for a compromise that will benefit all parties involved. Good luck.

The best they can come up with turns out to be an effective gambit for Mean-Gideon, as it’s an offer few of the Legends can find good enough cause to refuse: Gideon and her rogue counterpart get to continue monitoring the timeline in the Waverider, and the Legends get to call it quits and live out their peaceful lives in retirement. “Legends don’t retire,” Nate protests, only they do—ask Ray, and Nora, and Amaya, and Jax, and Wally, and Mona, and Charlie, and Mick (wasn’t he supposed to pop in by now?), and don’t you dare forget the budget-crushing Hawk-people. Legends can retire, it turns out, but in bulk? Crazier things have happened (especially on this show). There is, however, one sticking point in this agreement that gives the Legends pause: What’s to stop Mean-Gideon from eradicating the Legends one by one when they’re off enjoying their early retirement in the near future?

The Legends need a plan. With Nate’s charged time courier, there’s a chance they can time-jump away from the methodical AI, but it involves a complicated run through the Waverider’s inner workings of vents and tubes to the armory, where a charger doth lie. (If only they had someone small enough to fit—oh, there’s something for Spooner to do.) Gideon’s good-faith deal with Gideon to show each of the Legends their own private futures becomes the perfect distraction for Spooner to wriggle through the Waverider and get their time courier zapped with plenty of juice for a jump—but it’s also a wistful opportunity for everyone to catch a glimpse of the lives they will live, or the love they will lose, depending on how the Legends decide their fates.

The unexpected wrinkle of this week’s episode is that Legends Of Tomorrow is itself heading towards an uncertain future, as far as its devoted audience is concerned. (Still no news on season eight.) “Too Legit To Quit” is a surprisingly melancholy episode that hosts an impromptu retirement party for the Legends, rife with cake and champagne and hugs and break dancing and a Beebo pinata, set to Faces’s “Ooh La La” this week is a Kodachrome reverie meant to put a lump in your throat.

So let’s humor Mean-Gideon. What would the Legends’ lives look like in the future, provided they give up their time-hopping ways? For Fancy Zari, fame and fortune as a cosmetic industry titan awaits. It’s a wonderful life, but not as heroic as Fancy Zari would like. Eff-Zee has been throwing herself at one obstacle after the other this season, and so she’s developed a taste for heroism even if her teammates often steal her thunder. Naturally this future gives her pause: “I thought there would be more time… to be a hero, I guess,” she confesses to Nate later on. As for Behrad, he becomes the star of a children’s television show called You, Me & B and a popular musician to boot. (The song he plays, which feature lyrics like “tomorrow’s better treated as today,” serves as the treacly soundtrack for the Legends’ crystal ball montage. It’s sweet!) Astra becomes a presidential candidate (her campaign drops sometime in 2040), and Nate (as well as Nate’s gigantic goatee) becomes a celebrated author, writing about the exploits of heroes instead of being remembered as one.

For other Legends, the future becomes more complicated. Sara and Ava see their daughter, which triggers dreams of porches and dogs and domesticity that run up against their duty as co-captains of the Waverider. Astra morphs into Spooner to continue the Legends’ ruse (“Dang!”) and discovers that her friend will be sent back to 1925 (which fixes a timeline anachronism) where she joins her mother in forming a clinic that helps hundreds of people. But she’ll be without her friends. And poor Dr. Gwyn Davies, whose only reason for becoming a Legend in the first place was to save his dear departed Alun, is offered perhaps the cruelest fate of them all: A beautiful life in 1925 Wales, but a lonely one.

It’s a sticky wicket. If the Legends agree to Mean-Gideon’s compromise, that means that their futures become immutable, dictated by their robot nemesis for as long as they live. As long as anybody lives. More alarmingly, this outcome begins to make a lot of sense for the Legends’ own Gideon, who would live the rest of her (presumably) mortal days as the AI’s captain, a steward of space-time, living her life with her newfound love, Gary Green.

Mean-Gideon’s plan is working. But the one thing her mechanical mind can’t quantify in her vast cerebral sea of 1s and 0s is the human need for love and acceptance. That’s why Gideon’s well-meaning (if surprisingly cruel) ruse to fool Gwyn with a robo-Alun doesn’t work: Manipulating humanity’s chaos-ridden hearts will always trigger far too many outcomes, and Gideon simply couldn’t account for Gwyn’s and Alun’s precious words for only each other: “In the river I have seen you, through love, age, and misery. In the river I will find you, for you will always be you, and I will always be me.”

Love is chaos, and for the sake of the timeline the Legends’ brand of chaos must be extinguished. So for Mean-Gideon’s latest monstrous act, she jettisons the only thing standing between her and her human counterpart: A human heart. Gary’s a goner and the Legends are scattered to the winds.

Stray Observations

• Episode’s MVL: Gary Green. Gary’s earnest vulnerability was the exact kind of humanity that needed to be levied against Gideon’s increasingly cold outlook on her responsibilities of the timeline. When he sobs into a couch cushion and asks the most complex question of them all—“Why is love so complicated?”—Mean-Gideon thinks she has the answer. It’s all a matter of complex chemistry. Gary reminded her, and us, that it’s far more than that. Good for Gary!
• Behrad: “Must be weird talking to someone who is you but also not you at the same time.” Fancy Zari: “Mm. Can confirm.”
• Fancy Zari called a map a “portable paper version” of the vent schematic.
• Spooner, to Astra: “You are a full-blown witch, mi grande amiga.”
• Those keys will likely reunite the Legends next week for their final season seven bow. What will Gwyn say to Gideon when they next meet? Is there room for forgiveness here?
• When should the Legends meet up post-retirement? Sunday at 9? Surely Wednesdays at 8 is better; after all, midweek parties are the best. But what timezone? “That would be 8/7c, only on the… you know? It doesn’t matter.”
• What did you think of “Too Legit To Quit,” group? Is Gary a goner? Will we lose yet another Legend in the trenches of WWI next week? What kind of cake do you suppose the Legends were eating for their retirement party? Bring some plates to the comments below.