As the Legends try to get back to the Waverider, the pieces are starting to come together about what’s going on. And now I’m wondering if the team is going to pick up two new Legends rather than just one. Spoilers follow for Legends of Tomorrow Season 7, Episode 6, “Deus Ex Latrina.”
“Deus Ex Latrina”
ADDITIONAL BAGGAGE — When the Legends and Gwyn (Matt Ryan) finally time travel, the time machine goes haywire leaving them stranded in a lush forest with no idea when or where they are. Seeing that Sara (Caity Lotz) and Ava (Jes Macallan) are noticeable stressed, Nate (Nick Zano) takes over and gives everyone tasks to set up camp to keep everyone occupied. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the Legends, someone keeps trying to destroy the anomalies that keep popping up which could create bigger ripples throughout history.
This week’s episode takes our heroes–finally time travelers once again–to Chernobyl just hours before the infamous meltdown that has left the area blighted for generations. But this isn’t a race against time to save the people who live in that area, because most of the Legends don’t know what’s happening until just moments before it happens.
Dr. Davies
Instead, this episode zooms in on the newest hanger-on, Dr. Gwyn Davies, and once-and-future villain Bishop as he comes to grips with his responsibilities as captain of the Waverider.
Gwyn is a massive pile of issues, it turns out. He’s a genius, but he’s also a war veteran suffering from PTSD and a gay man in a time when even the notion of such a thing was difficult for people to conceive of. Davies echoes Constantine’s guilt-driven need to be alone, but without also requiring him to be a jerk. Constantine was cool, sure, but Davies feels like a very different take on a similar set of ideas.
Bishop
And then there’s Bishop. He’s a true Legends character in that he is too smart for his own good and finds himself increasingly sticky situations as a result. Believing he had to get revenge on the Legends for exploiting them, Bishop built his own Waverider using the blueprints stored in his stolen Gideon backup. He was the one who blew up the Waverider, of course, and then he and Evil Gideon combined their resources to build clone robots to replace J. Edgar Hoover and Thomas Edison.
As a side note, this is one of the things I like about Legends of Tomorrow. Most shows that introduce time travel do so to inject drama and conveniently ignore the ramifications of it, and introduce all kinds of plotholes. Legends isn’t immune from that, but seems to know when those loopholes are appearing and decides instead to have fun with them. Instead of Bishop trying to undo the Legends’ mistakes, which were caused by his mistake, which was caused by their mistake, he just makes another mistake, and it’s a cool mistake that involves Time Robots.
Bishop annoyed the crap out of me last season but in typical Legends style, he’s growing on me. When Bishop realizes that Gideon is making a robot clone of himself, that leads directly into this Bishop finding out, in just a few seconds, everything that went on last year. In that moment he realizes he’s the baddie–something he never wanted. Instead of trying to fix it, though, he just nopes out, dropping out of the Waverider through an escape hatch in the form of a porcelain toilet.
Can he learn?
Now, there’s a robot-clone version of Bishop living Bishop’s life, a corrupted version of Gideon who can unleash robot-clones whenever it likes, and Bishop himself lands, toilet first, on the Legends, seemingly with the agenda of making up for his misunderstanding and mistakes. I wouldn’t have guessed this twist was coming, and it casts Bishop in an entirely new light. Will he end up becoming the hero he sees himself as, or does his penchant for the grandiose mean that he’ll always become a villain?
That latter part seems like the main character arc for him; developing an ability to let himself not be the center of attention and just do good work in the background. The Legends are the main characters of this show, but they’re anomalous footnotes in history.
It’s not the most significant episode by any means, but it does a lot of work on Bishop and Gwyn to turn them into proper characters, and that will be important moving forward.
