What I’m Watching: Legends of Tomorrow

Legends of Tomorrow: Season 7, Episode 5 “It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Scientist” (B)

I was beginning to wonder whether the legends were going to be stuck in 1925 all season, or if Spooner, Astra, and Gideon would get left there while the legends were marooned elsewhere after a one-way trip. It looks like that may not be the case, and at least they’ll all be together, but it’s not clear where they’ve ended up and if it’s going to take a whole lot of time to perfect this whole science of time travel thing. I like that Zari was able to use the technology in the Hoover bot to replace what they needed, but the bigger question is how much of history has been fabricated with endless robot replacements, like the Einstein and Hoover that showed up just after the reprogrammed Hoover short-circuited and the real Einstein promptly died of shock. The casting of Matt Ryan as Doctor Gwyn Davies is an interesting choice, though I was never fond of Constantine, and the repeated assertions that he looks just like other cast members is a funny way of acknowledging that it’s the same actor in a new role. I did like when Maisie Richardson-Sellers got to stick around as Charlie after Amaya left, though she at least had a different accent in that case. Ava and Gary disappearing briefly when the timeline changed was a worrisome development, though it only further makes me wonder how much of this show actually makes any sense. The concept of the “lucky rock” was a productive fusion of this show’s balance of superpowers and magic, with Astra’s conjuring of something that didn’t actually work being just the motivation it needed to be for those who believed.