Ladies, gentlenerds, and AVAs, welcome to this recap of Legends of Tomorrow Episode 605, The Satanist’s Apprentice, aka the partially animated one one Caity Lotz directed.

Once upon a time there was a beautiful woman who stepped off her throne in hell to join some time-traveling idiots and then decided to take a stab at living a normal human life. However, she’s in England in the 80s (I still don’t understand why she couldn’t be in 2021 but timey is wimey, yaknow?) and she has no money, no topside skills, and seemingly no luck. She gets stranded with a baguette at the farmer’s market, splashed by a car in a puddle, and insulted by a racist neighbor.

Astra snarls at him and scares him off before storming back to the manor in a huff. When she sees Constantine inside, she asks him for help getting money or food but he rushes off on a Legends mission. Astra is big mad.

Astra was having a 2020 kind of day.

The next time Constantine comes sweeping through, Astra asks for some basic commodities like a washing machine or the internet, but Constantine is just BACK from a Legends mission this time and is a bit…distracted by Zari.

Astra tries to take things into her own hands by finding a job, but she is legally 15 in this time period, has no on-paper experience, and frankly doesn’t have the temperament for a job hunt as proven by her threatening a potential employer with a blood pool.

While trying to take charge of her own destiny, Astra finds her way to the attic and finds her mom’s journal that has a song labeled ‘for John’ written in it that Astra can’t read. Suddenly, she hears a voice, and she follows it to the back of the attic where there is a creepy-ass painting taunting her about being a fallen great.

I love a lady with a candelabra. See also: Cheryl Blossom.

It’s the painting of Aleister Crowley, where he has been trapped since the Legends dispatched him. He says that even though once she ruled in hell, now she’s no better than a helpless princess. He offers to teach her some magic to help her out and she’s at the end of her rope so she listens.

Astra this is why you should just rejoin the Legends. The Waverider always has wifi.

Meanwhile on the mystery planet, Sara is face to face with her captor, who calls himself Bishop. She presumes he’s the Space Lord but he’s more like a Disco Dude. And he’s excited to meet THE Sara Lance. He offers her an antidote to the Amelia Earhart alien that attacked her, and she hesitates from taking a neon green elixir from a stranger on a strange planet, but he’s claiming to want to save all of humanity and is counting down to her inevitable death so she takes a calculated risk and downs the offered drink.

Sara goes down and when she comes to, she is tied to a bed and being tended to by an Ava-shaped nurse which isn’t nearly as sexy as it sounds.

I mean, it’s not NOT sexy.

Sara tries to get Nurse Ava to set her free, but Nurse Ava says Sara has to prep her for “the transition.” Bishop comes in and starts telling her about how human greed destroyed the Earth, and he says he was the only survivor. He also says he’s the founder of AVA Corp and wants to restart humanity by making beings that can take human form but are superior to humans, biologically. Creatures that look like Gary, Kayla, and Amelia Earhart.

I’d give it a D for content but a solid B+ for presentation.

Sara thinks this is a terrible idea.

Bishop tells Sara he wants her DNA so she spits on the ground for him, but that’s not what he wants from her. He wants her to help her train these new beings, to instill in them the fighter spirit of “the woman who can’t be killed.” And Sara almost takes it as a compliment but she’s got people waiting for her back on.

Bishop tries to convince her that he made all the Avas, that even the one she fell in love with is his own accomplishment, and she calls him, and I quote, a “sick son of a bitch.” Bishop leaves her in the care of Nurse Ava, who sets her up with “all 15 seasons” of Wynonna Earp and suddenly I find myself wishing I was on this mysterious planet in the future.

We even get to hear a bit of the theme song, which made my body react before my brain even processed what was happening.

I’ve also (metaphorically) tied friends down and forced them to watch Wynonna Earp, so this is relatable.

I love when shows I love reference shows I love. Nicole Haught gave Sara Lance a shout-out in Season 4, and now Ava is returning the love.

When Constantine returns again, he catches Astra getting magic lessons from a painting. He starts to scold her and she calls him a hypocrite and tries to do a spell to shut him up but ends up swapping Aleister Crowley and Constantine. She immediately switches them back so, knowing it’s easy enough to undo, she decides to keep Crowley out for a while to get some up close and personal magic lessons. She threatens Crowley, says this is a limited-time offer that expires the second he does something she doesn’t approve of. And she’s very proud of herself for getting the upper hand in this situation.

I would argue Astra was too smart to fall for Crowley’s bullshit but also she’s desperate, so.

Crowley teaches her to turn trash into treasure, change her outfit, update the manor’s interior decorating. Things she wanted to do that Constantine wouldn’t teach her.

“Beluga sevruga, come winds of the Caspian Sea!”

Crowley calls her a natural at the dark arts, which she attributes to her mother, but as she’s strutting around the manor and admiring her work, she finds the pile of treasure has turned to trash again.

He explains that the glamor is a starter spell, teases her with the promise of more power, and she takes the bait. She wants to level up.

Up in Disco Dude’s lair, When Nurse Ava comes to check on Sara, presumably at least 18 hours later, she asks Sara if she’s an “Earper for life” yet. Sara says she agrees that the second season is when the show really found its footing, and Nurse Ava asks if she’s a WayHaught shipper. It’s hilarious and adorable and it made me as giddy as the time Wynonna Earp and One Day at a Time gave each other on-screen love.

“If you insult Waverly Earp, I WILL have to tighten these restraints. Those are simply the rules.”

Before Sara and Nurse Ava can get into the Great Willa Debate, Sara pins Nurse Ava with a shiv she made from the remote and tries to threaten her into letting her go. But Nurse Ava says she’s disposable, that Bishop will just replace her with another Nurse Ava after she’s gone, and this shocks Sara into loosening her grip a little.

Me being dramatic when I have the slightest cold.

She tries to reason with Nurse Ava, explain to her that she might have been created by Bishop, but she’s her own person with autonomy, with a soul. He doesn’t control her. But Ava just tells Sara to get back in bed and closes the door behind her.

Back in Northumberland, the painting of Constantine is trying to convince Astra to stop and switch them back, but Astra isn’t hearing it. She was sucked into hell as a scared little kid and had to fight tooth and nail to gain the power she had there. She won’t start from scratch again, she can’t. She wants the shortcuts and she wants them now.

But of course, Crowley has his own goals in mind and has no intention of going back in the painting if he can help it. Before she can begin her next magic lesson, she hears the Legends all clomping into the manor, tired from having to WALK like a REGULAR PERSON all the way from where Mick kicked them off the Waverider to the mansion they couldn’t use Google maps to find. They are all talking over each other and asking her for different things, all while she’s trying to hide the fact that she let a cultist inhabit Constantine’s body while their sorcerer friend is trapped in a painting, so she loses her cool and turns everyone into inanimate objects.

The number of times in my life I would have turned my little brother into a toothbrush.

And suddenly it’s a modern-day, low-budget Beauty and the Beast in here. Ava is a binder, Behrad is a candlestick, Zari is a flip phone, Nate is a wheel of cheese, and my favorite note to type on this list: SPOONER IS A FORK.

Crowley convinces Astra that in order to really level up her magic, she needs a soul to sacrifice. At first she’s going to choose one of her soul coins from Hell, considering monsters like Christopher Columbus. She chooses her local racist instead, which I think is a fine plan, but Behrad is worried about what this will do to Astra’s soul.

Having presumably run out of Wynonna episodes, and perhaps being inspired by an Earp sister training montage or two, Sara is doing pushups in her room when Nurse Ava sneaks in, saying Bishop is asleep and she wants to help Sara, even brought her a fuel cell for the spaceship she landed in.

“I’ve got a backpack, got a backpack full of sunshine.”

Nurse Ava says she heard what Sara said, really took it to heart, that she has a soul and wants and dreams and opinions, and that Bishop’s plan is idiotic. So they start their jailbreak. Hilariously, without Gary as even a consideration.

At the manor, Astra still has little trinkets in her ear trying to convince them not to steal a random guy’s soul so she gathers them all up and shoves them aside before he can be too suspicious. The neighbor continues to be a monster, so she pulls out the necklace she needs to suck his soul out.

Is it possible that Olivia Swann is actually an ethereal being?

But at the last minute, decides against it. But before she can kick the neighbor out to save his soul, Crowley appears and does the deed for her.

Furious, Astra tries to swap Crowley and Constantine back, but with his newly acquired soul powers, he’s too strong for her level one magic. He calls her a helpless princess again, and then decides to use his new powers to make her one.

I love how there was an entire animated singing sequence in this episode and it didn’t feel off the wall at all because of the lack of lines or boundaries this show has.

Astra starts to sing, largely against her will, but she and the Legends attack, Behrad pulling a Lumiere, Ava flapping around like a book from Pagemaster.

This show is like the manifestation of the phrase “you had to be there.” You can’t explain it to anyone.

But Crowley is too strong and banishes her to the attic where she fights the urge to keep singing.

I’m not sure a cartoon as any right to be this pretty.

Luckily, she’s not alone; she has the cartoon version of the painting of Constantine to keep her company. He tells her about a magic cleansing spell her mother kept on hand in case Constantine ever lost control, like magical Narcan, and Astra realizes it’s probably the song she found earlier.

She said earlier she didn’t know how to read music, but now that she’s looking at it again, she realizes the notes make sense to her. What Crowley didn’t realize was that by turning her into a cartoon princess, he gave her the inherent gift of music.

For the honor of Grayskull!

Spooner uses her fork tines to unlock the attic door and Astra starts to sing.

After a very magical scene that is truly bonkers in a way this show does best, Astra prevails and everything goes back to normal, including getting Crowley back in the painting where he can’t steal any more souls. When the racist neighbor comes to and demands to know who these people who randomly appeared are, Astra calls them her friends and kicks him out of her house.

As the dust settles in the aftermath of the day’s chaos, Astra realizes something; in stripping Crowley’s powers while he was in Constantine’s body, she stripped Constantine’s powers, too. John knew that would happen before he even told her about the song, but he knew it was the only option to save the girl he promised to protect.

Like, this is supposed to be “disheveled” Astra. She looks better than I did at my senior prom.

The good news is, this means Constantine has to start from scratch, learning and collecting magic from scratch. Like restarting a video game. So this time, he’ll take Astra along on his journey.

When Sara and Nurse Ava get to the ship, Sara soon learns she’s been double-crossed. Nurse Ava’s loyalties still lie with Bishop, and the fuel cell is just Bishop’s nightlight. It turns out Nurse Ava still sees Bishop as a god of sorts, and Bishop just wanted Sara to lead him to the ship she arrived on.

She boasts about yeeting all the aliens in the pods across space and time, but he already has all the DNA he needs. Sara fights her way out while Nurse Ava watches, easily taking down the Ava guards, and ultimately snapping Bishop’s neck. But as she stands over her slain enemy, an unseen source hits Sara with a tranq dart.

When Sara wakes up, back in Bishop’s disco den, he says they went on “quite the adventure” together. He now says that they’re…inseparable. And I worry that he’s linked their lifelines somehow. Maybe he’s as unkillable as she is now.

I know this isn’t the point but I feel like Cosima would like this shirt.

Next week, the Search for Sara continues!

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