Previously on Legends of Tomorrow, a bunch of villains from throughout history were released from hell and the Legends had to travel through space and time to kill these Encores with hell weapons, they learned their buddy Charlie was actually Clotho the fate and she got tricked by her sisters to rejoin their ranks and they rewrote the fate of the world, but the Legends rebelled from their TV universe, much to Charlie’s dismay.

As she heads back to her sisters, Charlie is realizing that the Legends have started the rumblings of a rebellion, and she is so stressed about it.

Her desperate little, “Even I like the blue mush!” was so cute.

She tries to play it cool when she gets to the Temple of the Loom and sits next to her fellow fates in the throne room, where they will start seeing their people’s requests, trying to pretend like everything is fine.

Meanwhile, the Legends, fresh out of their TV boxes, are trying to find the Loom. And also thus begins a series of hilarious moments where Zari 2 and Original Zari joke about their continued mutual existence, like how Zari 2 thinks Original Zari’s voice is weird.

They run into Gary and Mona, who tell them that if the Waverider is anywhere, it’s likely at the Forbidden Dump, where all the fun things go to die.

So while Ava leads half the team there, Sara and Constatine go to the Hall of Fates. They use Sara’s blindness to their advantage and Sara easily takes down some guards, and they lead the rest of the team in to find the Loom.

Good ol’ Sara “roll with the punches” Lance.

In the throne room, one worshipper asks for more blue mush, and Lachesis grants it nobly. The next asks for her favorite TV shows to come back from hiatus, which is a mood, and when Charlie says the actors needed a break, she asks if they were tired from the crossover. Which is already hilarious, since often CW actors do indeed need a hiatus from the crossover, but just to add a little extra Legends jab at it, Atropos asks with disdain in her voice, “What is a crossover?”

When Lachesis realizes what Clotho did, she is furious, but Clotho tries to defend her old crew. She points to how they were cleaning up the Encore mess and it wasn’t even their fault, and Lachesis (whose fault it actually was) gaslights Charlie into thinking the Encores were HER fault, because Clotho broke the Loom in the first place, creating chaos and therefore creating villains. Lachesis asks her sister what she thinks the people would prefer, more choices, or everlasting peace. Charlie looks out over these helpless mortals, thinks of all the friends she’s lost or almost lost, thinks of all the pain and suffering she thinks she caused, and sits down, giving in. She says they would want peace.

You can’t be so afraid of pain that you keep yourself from feeling anything at all, bb.

Sara, Astra and Constantine continue their quest for the Loom, and once they find it, they set out to destroy it. Astra doesn’t think she has enough power to do it, but Constantine knows she has her mother’s magic blood in her and encourages her to channel it.

At the Dump, Ava, Zari, Nate and Mick all find the Waverider, so Mick heads off to find Lita before they go. They realize Gideon is broken, and that they need a superconductor to get the ship back up and running again, so Zari uses Steely Nate so Ava can get them off the ground.

When Zari 2 and Behrad go undercover in the throne room, they realize they only see two of the Fates…but that’s because Atropos found Sara first.

“Ava? Is that you? Save that for tonight, babe.”

Atropos is amused that Sara “bears the scars” of their last encounter, but Sara says her scars make her stronger before using her new Fate-given powers to defeat her at her own game.

Astra starts to realize that she replaced some of her memories with Lachesis, causing her powers to falter, but as Atropos is telling Sara that these powers come from her, Sara insists that her real power comes from her team. To prove her point, the Team Totem swoops in and blasts Atropos away from Sara. Sara realizes that if she has some Fate power in her, she can use it to her advantage, and snipps Atropos’ thread. Defeated at her own game.

The Legends all rush back to the Waverider and quickly jump out of that time period to avoid Lachesis’s wrath, and when they land, they’re still in the Forbidden Dump. But suddenly, Sara can see. They realize her powers must have been linked to Atropos and with her gone, she’s back to our regular old Paragon assassin. And it feels appropriate that the first thing she sees is trash.

But the second thing she sees is her beautiful girlfriend, and she’s thrilled about it.

I’d miss that face, too.

When they head outside to see when they are and what has changed, they learn that they’re only a few months into the future. Things seem normal at first glance, until they realize that everyone is relying on their smartwatches to make every decision for them. And instead of Siri or a Google Assistant, they’re asking Fate. The Legends see the billboards all around them and know that Lachesis might not have the loom, but she’s still controlling everyone’s fate.

The Legends head to where the temple used to be but now it’s a history museum documenting the atrocities of free will to help scare people into trusting the Fate technology. The Legends head into the Hall of Bad Ideas, which features arguably great ideas like glitter and spring shoes, along with unequivocally bad ideas like the Shake Weight and The Thong Song. Ava goes over to this Sisqo exhibit and is reading the lyrics aloud, confused as to how this was such a smash hit in the early aughts, to which I have no good answer for her. The song slaps but the lyrics to leave something to be desired.

Nate really wants to play the song but Sara stops her and leads her team to the Hall of Villains. The Encores they’ve spent the season fighting (plus more of history’s big bads) are all displayed and ranked here, including the lovely Marie Antoinette.

Behrad and Original Zari are still trying to fix the Waverider, and I’m just so glad we got a little more time with our flannel-clad tech genius.

Who will take up the plaid representation when she’s gone?

But something isn’t quite right, because Behrad has a flash of a memory of dying in her timeline.

As the team goes through the Hall of Villains, they realize that they’re cataloged here too, labeled Godkillers. I feel like we’re tiptoeing on infringing the Worldkillers here, but Lachesis wouldn’t care too much about that now would she. Also, Ava is a little hurt that they’re only number two on the list.

If you’re gonna be the worst, you might as well be the best at it.

They go to see who the #1 worst villain in history is, and are surprised to find Charlie there, trapped only by the will of her Fatewatch who tells her to stay. She’s so scared that they’re there, so scared she’ll hurt someone again. So they feel they have no choice but to knock her out and take her back to the ship.

“I had the strangest dream…and you were there, and you.”

Charlie is nearly frantic because she’s not where the Fatewatch told her she should be. She tells her captains that she regrets being the Loom Breaker, Creator of Chaos. It’s so sad and scary to see wild and free Charlie having been scared and manipulated to the point of being this scared and obedient Clotho. Sara and Ava blame themselves, for leaving Charlie behind and letting Lachesis get into her head.

Even the best captains make mistakes sometimes.

Charlie insists that Lachesis only did what was best for her, because they’re family, but Sara says that THEY’RE her family, not Lachesis. That overpowering and controlling someone isn’t loving them. That deciding what’s best for you instead of helping you decide for yourself isn’t taking care of them.

And Astra is learning the same lesson at the same time. All these years she thought Lachesis was loving her, raising her, but she was really training her, making her forget her own mother. But that’s not reality, and it’s not what Astra wants.

The Legends get together to try to sell Charlie on the concept of free will, but everything they offer her she has an answer for. The Beatles were great, sure, but they also inspired Charles Manson. Mona tries to use Mamma Mia 2: Here We Go Again (a nice little nod to Original Zari’s loop episode), but Charlie reminds them that Napoleon once almost killed them because of Abba. Ava and Sara try a different route, and try to point out that their entire relationship wouldn’t exist without chaos.

“I mean look at us! We’re disaster queers! Even if our paths had crossed we wouldn’t have ended up together without the gentle nudging of these other fools!”

Random twists of fate brought them together, an assassin and a clone, a vigilante time traveler and the lead of the agency built to thwart them. Sure there have been mistakes along the way, but sometimes mistakes just help guide us toward our destiny. But Charlie remains unconvinced.

“Love is a lie.”

After giving up trying to sell free will to Charlie, the Zaris work together to try to find the Loom of Fate that surely must still exist if all these people are zombies, all while Behrad tries to hide the fact that a bullet wound is slowly forming in his chest. With Original Zari’s guidance, Zari 2 finds the source of the Fatewatch, but it’s not the Loom at all. They really did destroy that. Instead, the people are being controlled by Lachesis and Gideon.

When Charlie realizes that they’re still on a mission to stop Lachesis, she tries to talk them out of it. The Legends, in turn, try to explain that they need her help to expose Lachesis as a fraud. But Charlie doesn’t want any part of this.

You will never convince me that these ladies never had a threesome. Sorry, not sorry.

So the Legends move forward with their plan without her. When Lachesis gets to the point of the History Museum tour that she’s supposed to reveal the Loom Breaker, Lachesis is faced with Astra instead. She realizes that Lachesis never really loved her, she was just a placeholder for Clotho. She smiles at this woman she once trusted and dares her to fight her. “Smite me,” she says, a mischievous smile on her face, knowing full well Lachesis doesn’t have her powers. And when Lachesis is all but “you and what army,” the Legends reveal that they were hiding in their own exhibit this whole time, really nailing the mannequin challenge.

The Zaris, meanwhile, use their combined knowledge and cleverness to hack into Gideon to get her off the Fatewatch network.

“I am me, and she is she, except when I pretend I’m her.”

While Sara, in her old White Canary outfit, explains that sometimes they mess things up for the better. And that it’s okay to have free will and make the wrong choice sometimes.

CAW CAW MOTHERFUCKERS

And then the Zaris manage to stop Gideon from being a pseudo-Loom, leaving Lachesis without her humans doing her bidding.

Zari 1 looked deep within my soul and WINKED.

Lachesis still has an army of her own though, and releases the souls of the villains she’s entombed in the museum, so they spring to life and start fighting. In one of my favorite exchanges of the episode, Nate asks Sara if she has any ideas, and Sara says, “Just a lot of bad ones,” which would be funny enough on any other day, but then when you realize the Legends’ next step is to grab makeshift weapons from the Hall of Bad Ideas, it’s just delicious. Ava grabs the Shake Weights.

She’s just! So serious about them! Why is this the funniest thing I’ve ever seen!

Astra swipes the Flowbee, and Sara wields a pogo stick like it was part of her arsenal all along.

Queen of the Improvised Weapon

Nate hits the Thong Song button on the way back into the fight, a perfectly ridiculous choice to soundtrack the Legends’ big boss battle. Marie Antoinette fights fiercely, but is ultimately beheaded again, much to her dismay.

Courtney Ford deserves better.

The Legends quickly realize that the Bad Idea weapons won’t actually kill these Encores, and they need hell weapons. The ones that are all the way back on the Waverider.

On said timeship, Charlie is moping when Lita finds her. Lita is real with her in that candid teenager way. She says sure, 49% of life is just garbage, but 51% is good. And that 2% difference is worth fighting for. She uses her very existence as proof that chaos can be good. She was born of chaos. But the messy bits of life are what make it beautiful. The chaos colors a greyscale world.

“I was ready to burn everything to the ground a few weeks ago. And now I’m literally saving the free world. Trust me.”

So Charlie rounds up all the hell weapons and goes to join her family. When she gets to the fight, Sara is so excited to see her. She apologizes for being late to the party, but Sara says she’s wild and unpredictable, just the way they like her. She hands Charlie a hell dagger and says she’s the only one who can stop Lachesis.

Someone who looked this good encouraging me would give me the confidence to try literally anything.

Charlie stands up to her sister and realizes that she thought she needed Lachesis to forgive her, but maybe it’s the other way around. So Clotho forgives her. Lachesis laments going from being a god to being nothing, but Charlie promises her that being a human is a world of chaos is a beautiful thing, and not to waste it by trying to control things she has no right to control. And Clotho leaves Lachesis to ponder her new fate.

After the battle’s done, and they kind of won, the team heads back to the Waverider. Original Zari and Zari 2 are giving each other shit about their respective boyfriends, and for some reason neither of them mention their crushes on Charlie but whatever it’s cute.

I think having two of me at once is my own brother’s personal nightmare but Behrad is taking it in stride.

But then Behrad’s phantom wound starts to spread. Original Zari realizes that her existence is causing a temporal disturbance, and that in order to keep Behrad safe and Zari 2’s timeline intact, she has to go back into the totem. She turns to her brother and says it’s her turn to save him, and starts to say her goodbyes as my heart breaks.

Sara wants to do something, to try to find a way, but Original Zari is resigned to her fate. She says Sara’s already done everything she wanted her to: she found Zari in this timeline, and she “brought me home.”

MY HEART IS BROKEN. I LOVE YOU MORE THAN YOU LOVE DONUTS, ORIGINAL ZARI!

She says one last teary goodbye and totems herself back into Behrad’s bracelet.

I know that technically it would have been impossible to keep both Zaris (and also probably a nightmare for Tala Ashe) but oh i loved them both so much and I didn’t want to say goodbye. Hopefully we can still visit her in her little totem world every once in a while.

The Legends are ready for a break to celebrate their latest victory, and Charlie has an idea of where to start. They all don their best 70s London punk garb and go watch Charlie perform with The Smell and sings a punk cover of Mr. Parker’s Cul-de-Sac, because of course she does.

This my friends is what we call bringing it full cul-de-sac circle.

Astra gives Constantine his soul coin back as rent for spending the hiatus at his mansion, and the Legends all mosh and enjoy their last hoorah for a while, Charlie blowing them a kiss from the stage.

I feel like Maisie and Tala have played more characters between them than the rest of the cast combined.

On the way out, feeling sloppy from being able to finally let go and have fun for a night, Charlie lets them know that this is her stop. She can finally stop running for the first time in centuries, and this is where she wants to stay. The gang says goodbye, Sara letting her know that she’s welcome back any time. Because once a Legend, always a Legend.

LOOK AT THAT LIPSTICK! THE SEPTUM RING! SEND HELP!

And here we say goodbye not only to Charlie, but to Maisie Richardson-Sellers. She came to us as Amaya, then Charlie/Clotho, and she brought such unique energy to each woman. Amaya was sweet and gentle and brought a sense of wonder to the already-kind-of-jaded group. And Charlie…oh, Charlie! She started as a captive, an enemy who stole their friend’s face, a rebel with an attitude who hadn’t stayed still long enough to find a family since she left her sisters. But she learned and she grew and she flirted and she loved until the selfish, chaotic girl risked everything to save the Legends in the end.

Maisie was a queer actress playing a queer character, and an amazing one at that, and it’s hard to watch her go. But the truth is, Maisie’s contract was up, and she wanted to move on to new horizons, start new projects. And so, the writers gave her one last season to shine, making the entire thread of this fifth season linked to her character. Gave her a hero’s ending. (And didn’t kill her off just because she was leaving the show! What a concept!) It sounds like the parting was mutual and planned, and that the writers will always leave a time courier available in case she wants to join the Legends again someday.

Miss you already, you beautiful pansexual shapeshifting Fate, you.

As the Legends start to leave, Sara hears something strange so she hangs back from the group just a few steps, but enough that in their bustle to get back to the ship, they don’t see a beam of light come down and lift Sara up and up and up. It seems our Captain was abducted by aliens.

Maybe it’s just Kara picking her up for game night.

Dun dun dun!!

The good news is, the show was already renewed for a sixth season, though Beebo knows when it will air. Until then, I thank you so much for being patient with me and for reading my recaps over this season; it’s been so fun to watch and laugh and theorize with all of you.

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