Review: Legends of Tomorrow: Episode 3 Blood Ties

Note: Spoilers Ahead

Now when I first heard about Legends I was excited. I mean DC superheroes and time travel sounds like my kind of show, but we are heading into our fourth week of the show as episode 4 airs tonight and we haven’t done much time traveling.

In episode 3, we are still in the 70’s but still I would love some variety in the show. And I know they are apparently stuck in this time period and for budget reason keeping it to the 70’s would be a benefit, but still I would love to go to another decade and have the time travel show we were promised. Now after that small rant let’s get to last week’s episode.

The episode focused on three fronts this time, with some nice backstory thrown in for good measure, as we focused on Captain Cold[Wentworth Miller], Heatwave[Dominic Purcell] and Jax [Franz Drameh] heading off to steal a jewel. Sara [Caity Lotz] and Rip [Arthur Darvill] go on a merry mission to steal Savage’s [Casper Crump] money (which is very rude) and Atom [Brandon Routh] and Stein [Victor Garber] go all Fantastic Voyage to save Kendra’s [Ciara Renée] life. We also learn there is more history (can that be classed as a pun, when it involves time travel?) between Rip and Savage than just the murder of Rip’s family.

Let’s start with the slightly more interesting (in my opinion) storyline with Cold, Heatwave and Jax’s as they go robbing, while at first this seemed like just a throwaway plot to make the characters look busy and for the most part it was. It gave us some great character development for Cold as the real reason for him stealing the jewel to stop his father from going to jail.

Eventually Cold threatens his father into not stealing the jewel which of course doesn’t work as his father still tries to still it and goes to jail. This storyline was a good one as Cold did what I feel most of us would if we could time travel, which is to try and change something from the past.

Another part that felt off was during the confrontation between Cold and his father, where Cold all but told him a lot about his future including the birth of his sister, which when you think about should at least partially effect the timeline, but we’ll have to wait and see. Also both Heatwave and Jax’s felt underused in this scenario, and while Heatwave did have some funny lines, and showed concern for his friend, they still felt as a second thought.

Next Sara and Rip head off to perform Ocean’s Eleven (Ocean’s Two?) as they head to a highly secretive bank in Germany where everyone who works there is American (I mean no one even tried an accent) to steal or at least find where savage hides his money. They instead find out about something called the Vessel, which leads straight into Sara going all Sherlock Holmes, discovering that it’s a trap and the bank works for Savage. Leading to funny but murderous scene that leaves one survivor and left me questioning the timeline – as Sara’s killing urge was stopped by John Constantine on Arrow but apparently still exists which left me confused.

The Survivor, however, tells the team where to find Savage after revealing that the Vessel is actually Hawkman’s [ Falk Hentschel] body  but gives us one of the most intrigue parts of this episode, where he reveals that Rip had previously tried to kill Savage not soon after he gained immortality in Egypt, obviously failing as he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

Rip and Sara then head off with the survivor to get Savage. When they arrive they fall into a trap set by Savage and his followers who turn out to have been given longer lives after drinking Hawkman’s blood. As Savage prepares to kill Rip, the rest of the team arriving to help Rip and Sara escape and to reclaim Hawkman’s body. However, Rip accidentaly gives Savage the information that gets his family killed.

The last storyline, and least interesting, focused on Atom and Stein trying to save Kendra by letting the Atom shrink and enter her blood stream, after a few missteps Atom successfully destroys fragments of the Blade that Savage used to stab Kendra, which were travelling through her blood stream killing her and saves her life. For me this storyline didn’t gives us much, as granted Stein now knows about Ray’s wife which is not news to Arrow fans, but also had a slight subplot (I guess it can be called) as Stein remembers that Ray was his student, which was mentioned in the pilot but then at the end of the episode turns out he lied and still doesn’t remember Ray – which served no purposed in addition to being utterly pointless that could have been used for adding something new.

However, here are a few things to note:

• Rip saying he’s seen “Dark Knights fall and Men of Steel die”, which hopefully means that there is a Batman and Superman in the Flarrow universe rather than an alternate reality like Supergirl
• And I’m still left confused on the timeline.

Overall though, I, as always, had fun with this episode while some of character actions in my mind felt off and the Atom, Stein plot line wasn’t really needed and could have been dealt with quickly rather than taking the full episode.

We were given insight into Rip’s backstory – Savage actually felt like a main villain, but the team also now have a new mission to take down Savage which means hello the 1980’ and hello next episode.