Legends of Tomorrow "White Knights" Review

A nuclear superhero in Cold War Russia, that's actually pretty clever show, I’ll give ya that. Also you may have noticed no Arrow review this week, that's because honestly I’m bored of writing about that show. Now I put it into the Supergirl category of "I'll review it when I feel like it" (Though Supergirl is actually more interesting). But I'm not here to talk about that, I'm here to talk about Legends of Tomorrow and in this episode we see the gang travel to the 1980's Russia at the peak of the Cold War. They find out Savage is working on creating his own Firestorm so the team has to break into a Russian facility to steal their research and assets.

I’m starting to see a pattern here, the team travels somewhere, finds out Savage is working on something, they commit a heist to steal it back. Christ it’s only episode 4 and it’s already feeling formulaic, hell they do two heists in this one episode! But to be fair it’s not a bad formula, the fact that the team is so big means we get a lot of variety amongst the team members and their specific role. So in this episode we see Jax & Martin team up…again. And we see Leonard and Ray team up…again…Well at least we have new pairings with Sara and Kendra, dealing with Sara’s homicidal tendencies…again. Oh but Mick and Rip are new, talking about Rip’s dead family and how the time council people are refusing to help him…again. Okay so maybe the formula isn’t as creative as I initially thought.

But with that being said, just because we’ve seen these pairings before doesn’t mean we can’t get interesting scenes between them. Jax and Martin were definitely the highlight of the episode for me, their relationship is beginning to strain because of Martin constantly undermining Jax’s decisions…even though he is perfectly right to because Jax keeps making stupid decisions, but regardless it’s Martin’s motivations behind it, how he cares for Jax and just wants to keep him alive. Likewise, Jax refuses to listen because of course he’s pissed off at Martin, he dragged him on this mission and forced him to leave behind his old life, on top of that having your actions second guessed all the time would make a man question what the point of him being dragged along was. We also got a nice scene where Martin finally discusses how Ronnie’s death impacted him and how he doesn’t want that to happen again.

Then there was everything with Leonard Snart, a very Snart centered episode. We get some more of him and Ray bantering back n forth, but we also get a nice bit near the end of him showing genuine concern for his team, because even though he’s a villain, he’s a villain with a code, and that code involves never leaving a man behind. We also see more of Ray’s code, he’s not willing to sacrifice a life, innocent or guilty if there is something that can be done to prevent it, a very traditionally heroic DC trait to have there Palmer, I like it.

Now Mick though he didn’t have a lot to do in this episode we do get more than usual. We see how he functions separately from Snart and how he is quite intelligent in his own way, at least when it comes to reading people and acting on instinct. Also anyone who is a fan of Rocky IV is a good person in my books. Rip I didn’t really see the point in his story, an old friend of his tries to tempt him to give up and he considers for some reason? Why? He knew the council would be furious with him, hence why they’ve been chasing him, and if they give up now then nothing will have changed, I’m not sure why he would ever be tempted to give up. Honestly this just seems like filler and nonsensical repetition.

Sara and Kendra was okay, it was nice to see these two interact and work out their very similar problems with each other. But the thing is Kendra’s issue of losing control wasn’t even set up before this episode and is anyone else sick of their constant moaning about their issues? “Oh I have homicidal tendencies” “It’s not fair I turned out to be a Demi-God, I used to be normal” Christ, we get it! Life sucks! Can we please give these two something new to do!

And then the episode ends on a cliffhanger…I actually kinda like that, not to mention with the death of Carter earlier on this season it’s entirely possible that they may kill off one of the characters, in fact I thought there was actual potential that they were going to kill off Stein in this episode. I don’t want them too because I love Stein, but the fact that I can fear for a character’s life is actually quite rare for a superhero show, so good job on that.

Overall this was a fun episode, we got some good character stuff, some bad character stuff, some strong tension and a good cliffhanger. 7/10

-Danny