Hello cats and kittens, and welcome to this recap of Legends of Tomorrow episode 702, “The Need for Speed,” aka the one with the honeymoon of sorts.
We begin a hop, skip, and a jump past where we left our Legends. Gary hasn’t fully digested Hoover yet, and the Legends didn’t get all that far before their old timey car broke down. They are determined to fix the timeline before things are changed too much so they give Behrad some soda pop to put in the engine while they see what else they have in the car that could help them. They find a radio and listen to the local news to hear that the Bullet Blondes have made headlines.
“This is my JAM.”
Meanwhile, Nate is spiraling. He’s never killed anyone before, let alone a major player in American history. But Ava interrupts and tells them that she found Hoover’s train ticket so they need to speed up their quest to keep people from finding out he’s dead. They ask for Gary’s help with a spell and he can do one with some DNA, which luckily he has since he’s having a hard time keeping the ol’ boy down, what with all the cigars and bigotry.
Home on the range, Spooner and Astra are looking curiously at Gideon, who still looks a little out of it, and hasn’t spoken yet, but Spooner is so sure it’s her.
She’s got that Siren of Spacetime look to her yaknow?
Astra is furious that her spell backfired like this, and frustrated that Gideon won’t talk to them.
Team Train heads to the station but the potion isn’t ready yet, so they need a distraction. Nate pulls his hat low over his eyes and Sara handcuffs herself to her wife and parades them down the platform, bragging about the Bullet Blondes.
“Not what I thought we’d be doing with handcuffs on our honeymoon.”
They hoodwink their way to the honeymoon suite, ironically, and they can discuss what’s next. Nate refreshes their memory on who Hoover was, and while morally reprehensible, he did have a big impact, specifically in founding the FBI.
Sara and Ava decide to go on a real honeymoon and use the pocket dimension key to go to the mansion, where they can finally be alone.
Kind of hilarious that they flat-out left their team for the day so they could go have sex for hours.
Just kidding, they’re not alone, because Zari is still there, and high as a kite. She’s rambling nonsense and making herself giggle so before she can start singing Frère Jacques, Sara and Ava excuse themselves and tell Zari to give them some time before coming to ask them for anything. (To which she responds, “That’s gross, moms.” Which is cute.)
High Zari was very cute and I would watch a whole episode of just her wandering around the mansion high.
She then starts eating whipped cream directly from the can in an effort to distract herself from the sounds coming from directly above her. When Ava takes a break to come downstairs with no pants on, she apologizes for intruding on Zari’s solitude, but Zari feels chill about it. About everything at the moment, actually. Including Ava’s lack of pants.
I, on the other hand, felt much less calm about this situation.
Seeing Fancy Zari look so…not fancy is concerning to Ava, so she asks Zari to consider that maybe her brother’s coping mechanisms won’t work for her. She suggests trying to work on a project like cleaning the mansion, so she heads off to try to do just that.
On the farm, Gideon is turning apples into little faces and Spooner is amused but Astra is just stressed. She scowls as Gideon pokes her finger into the apple and passes right out. Gloria goes to her side and starts tending to her and realizes these kids took in a stray puppy but haven’t been feeding or watering her. Astra shrugs it off and says she’s not a real girl, but Gloria shows her that Gideon has a heartbeat now, so they should start treating her like it.
She also calls Astra a mother, which I find hilarious and Astra finds terrifying.
I’m high-key obsessed with this particular group of women.
In talking to Gloria, who asks why things aren’t just back the way they were now, Spooner and Astra realize the Legends are taking longer to enact their plan than they thought, and that they might need help. They really need Gideon.
On the train, when Nate drinks the potion and transforms into Hoover, Behrad and Gary are immediately shunned for not being straight, white, cis men. They stand back and watch as Nate embodies Hoover, solving the mystery of a stolen purse, trying to figure out why some FBI agents think someone is going to kidnap him. After some teamwork, the boys realize that the kidnapping plot is coming from inside the house, and their lead suspect is now the train’s conductor.
In the pocket mansion, Zari wants to start her new project by cleaning the refrigerator, but she quickly learns it’s been spelled to product a bottle of whiskey over and over again. This trips her mind out a little as she starts to think about the Waverider and the timeline and things get a little timey wimey in her high brain.
This is me drunk at 3am suddenly sure I have the best idea for a story ever only to wake up and realize it’s garbage.
Spooner is trying to decide if they should go after the rest of the Legends, but Astra points out that they are a Black lady, a brown lady, and a technically-a-computer lady; not exactly your standard 20s fare. Besides, Gideon still isn’t talking, she’s just making more apple dolls and putting them in a box. She made six apples, which is how many Legends are with the train portion of the party, so it’s concerning when Gideon then stomps those apples into applesauce.
What’s funny to me and probably me only is that “applesauce” is 20s slang for malarkey.
Astra snaps at Gideon, wishing out loud she would just plug herself back in so she can be THEIR Gideon again, and Gideon slinks away sadly. Spooner asks what Astra’s actual problem with Gideon is, and Astra admits that it’s just a reminder that her spell didn’t work the way she wanted it to. She feels useless. Spooner gets it; without her alien powers, and without any aliens chasing them down, she’s not sure what she brings to the team now. While wallowing in their self-pity and collective feeling of uselessness, they realize Gideon has wandered off. They find her at the fuse box, taking Astra’s advice too literally and zapping herself with wires.
Alright Amelia Bedelia let’s put the dangerous wires down.
They realize that Gideon understood Astra, and Astra suddenly feels extra bad about snapping at her.
In the mansion, Ava finds Zari looking more alert but less sane, as she’s sitting in the middle of dozens of bottles adorned with post-its, and she’s talking about how they need to pivot their thinking from HOW the Waverider got blown up and start trying to figure out WHO blew them up.
One of the bottles said Lex Luthor and I swear to Beebo if that cancer of a character comes to this show I’m rioting.
Zari has a list of suspects, and offers to show it to Ava, which frankly is too close to flirting when it comes to Ava to say to her on her honeymoon! But Ava is excited to see the list.
On the train, Nate needs a confession from the conductor, and Behrad gives him a pep talk before he goes in to remember who he is; he killed a man, but he’s not a killer. He’s pretending to be Hoover, but he’s not a bad guy. And at first it seems like the advice bounced off his steel skull but when he gets inside, he just fakes smashing things over the conductor’s head and actually talks to him much more reasonably. And that’s how he found out the conductor wasn’t going to kidnap him, the FBI agents were; they’re a fake. And they’re taking him to Al Capone.
A bunch of gangsters are lined up outside the train and Nate decides to face his consequences. But when he steps off the train, the potion wears off, and he’s just a regular joe schmoe standing in front of a man, asking him to shoot him.
In the pocket dimension, Ava and Zari are making some progress, labeling the bottles with the names of all their past enemies, and even some allies. There’s one bottle that they hold onto, wondering if it’s even worth considering as an option, when they’re interrupted by Behrad’s voice floating through the keyhole, where Sara joins them.
This shot was so fun it made me look up the director and I was delighted to learn it was a woman: Alexandra La Roche
Behrad apologizes for interrupting the honeymoon, but the truth is, the Legends are no good without their captains, and they’ve found themselves in a bit of a pickle. They promise to come help and Zari points out that all they have are weed gummies and booze, but Sara can work with that.
While Nate is confessing to the murder of J. Edgar Hoover and giving the gangsters a pep talk about deep breaths and self-love, the Bullet Blondes show up, booze in hand.
Gotta love it when the team needs their queer captains to save the day.
This is enough to make a gangster’s day and things seem to be calming down…until Hoover shows up. Zari’s timeline theories start whizzing around her head, but when the fight is over, it’s clear this isn’t the real Hoover. He’s too good a fighter. Sara smashes a bottle over his head, and they discover that he’s not the real Hoover, or even a real hooman. He happens to be the very thing that was on the post-it that was on the bottle that killed him: a robot.
The robot starts a self-destruct sequence so they all get the hell out of dodge, and fast.
Ava and Fancy Zari’s friendship is very important to me.
In Odessa, Gideon starts to wake up and is startled when she sees Astra there. But Astra isn’t here to scold her this time, she’s here to apologize, and to try to help her communicate by handing her a pen and paper. While they work on that, Spooner laments to her mom that she wishes there was more she could do. Gloria points out that Spooner didn’t talk until she was six, but they managed to communicate alright, and Spooner doesn’t even remember not knowing how to talk, so something occurs to her.
We might need to get Spooner some Theo Crain gloves soon.
She heads to the bed and sits down with Astra and Gideon, and reassures all three of them by way of the former-AI that she’s not useless, just figuring things out. She puts her hands out and gently touches Gideon, hoping her gift of understanding aliens who couldn’t communicate would extend to Gideon too.
I bet Gideon ships Spatula, too.
And it works! Inside Gideon’s mind Spooner can hear that familiar voice freaking out about not being able to get the Legends to understand her when the stakes are so high. When Spooner translates what she hears (that the Legends have to get to New York by November 7th, 1925, which is two weeks from today), this trigger’s Gideon’s go-to responses, “Precisely, captains.”
Finally able to speak, she explains that they have to beat the Legends to the time travel doctor they’re aiming for, or all the Legends will die. So this new trio grits their teeth and knows what they have to do; they have to save their family.
Astra’s journey from “Ugh I guess I’ll stay on the Waverider but I’m NOT a Legend” to “Gotta save the rest of our team, the Legends!” has been a delight.
And that’s a wrap on 702! Next week is the 100th episode, which looks like it will be full of chaos and mayhem and plenty of familiar faces. And I, for one, can’t wait.
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– New intro…and a new theme song.
– Nate acting more like first season Nate. (His first season.)
– Spooner reaching for Astra’s sugar pot.
– “My safe word is core competency.” I love it.
– Fermented Edgar Hoover hair? That CANNOT taste good.
– “That’s my girl.” I love Ava and Zari’s friendship. Could I ship them? Yes, but I just enjoy them really being friends.
– And now Spooner and Astra are mothers. This analogy is literally writing itself.
– Historically speaking, Nate is nobody compared to Hoover. That’s why they’re Legends. Because the timeline won’t miss them.
– No, I think that Zari is actually onto something.
– I think that Gideon is trying to tell them something about the other Legends.
– At last, people are seeing that Zari 2.0 is a genius.
– Zari and Ava are so cute together.
– I thought that that guy was supposed to be Al Capone.
– Is this an autism storyline? Both for Spooner and Gideon?
– I know who blew up the Waverider. The Wyld Stallyns.
Fun episode and recap as always!
I have to admit, this split-up device taught me how much I care about what’s going on with the girls, and how little I care about what’s going on with the boys.
Spatula is adorable, I’m excited for Analog Gideon, I absolutely would have a Wanted poster of the Bullet Blondes on my bedroom wall in 1925, and it’s great to see Fancy Zari channeling her breakup energy into solving this mystery. On the other hand, I don’t really need to see Nate grapple with the moral hardships of being a cishet white man with power in the 20’s, or have him mistreat Behrad and Gary. The less Hoover the better, imo.
This was a fun episode. I loved all of the storylines, especially Zari and Ava’s interactions.
Also, I love how Spooner’s mom just goes with the flow. Her “hello, computer” moment with Gideon was so great.
Excited for episode 100! And this season in general.
Ugh, so many good one lines.
I hope “Core Competency” becomes a running gag this season.
…but what’s Sara’s safe word?
Lex Luthor can’t have been the one to blow up the Waverider. In this canon he only succeeds at his plots when his plots involve having Lena do all the work.
Out of all the series, Legends has been the one that has been the most consistently good. Even the first season had its good moments (everything not directly related to the season arc). So I genuinely look forward to the 100th episode, more so than any other series.
“My safe word is Core competency”!
Pantless Ava coming down the stairs to Zari: “Nah, we weren’t that loud, were we?” And kite high Zari stage whispers “Core competency…” Hilarious!! How did this not make the recap????