Alright, at long last we have reached the Season 1 finale of ‘Legends of Tomorrow,’ in which we should finally see them get something right, especially if they are supposed to become “Legendary.” The episode opens with Rip bringing the remaining members of the team back to 2016 to drop them off (5 months after they left), realizing that he needs to go on alone and will be able to now that the Oculus has been destroyed. The team is not having it, but the Rip that followed them out of the ship is merely a hologram, as the real Rip has already sealed up the Waverider and is taking off, leaving his former teammates behind. First, of course, he is FINALLY going to replace their younger selves in the timeline, thus ensuring they are not erased from existence (at least they finally tied off that loose end, as it was driving me crazy).
Sara returns to Star City and meets up with Captain Lance, who is the sole member of Team Arrow holding down the fort at HQ while the rest are out battling Damien Darhk and his nuclear plans. Captain Lance has the unhappy task of telling Sara about Laurel’s death, which hits Sara exceptionally hard. Stein goes back to his wife, claiming to have been on sabbatical still, and has a newfound respect and interest in history, which he showcases while playing Trivial Pursuit with her. Still, it is clear he is not happy. Mick jumps right back into the swing of things by robbing a bank and trying to replace Snart, but the new guy is terrible and ends up getting blasted with Snart’s old cold gun, which Mick has kept. Ray appears offering Mick a ride from the crime scene, and they agree they both want to finish the mission and take down Savage. So in the end, Stein, Mick, Ray, Jax and Sara all meet where Rip dropped them off, and using some Ray and Stein science (or whatever it is they do, science is a little dubious on this show), they manage to send out a time message to Rip demanding he come back.
Kendra meanwhile has managed to sneak away from Savage in France of 1944, where Savage has gone to steal a meteor from the Nazi’s, supposedly one of three Thanagarean meteors infused with their technology that have landed on Earth (the first of which being the meteor that hit ancient Egypt and gave Savage, Kendra and Carter their powers.) Kendra does not make it far, but she does spot a solider wearing a familiar looking helmet, so she hastily scribbles a note and wedges it inside the helmet, right before Savage recaptures her, and take blood from both her and Carter to fulfill his nefarious plan. He informs the Hawkcouple that he plans on resetting time itself back to 1700BC Egypt, and this time he will not sit on the sidelines whispering into the ears of history’s leaders, but instead take over the world and rule it himself from the beginning.
Rip meanwhile is sadly watching old videos of his family once more, unable to find Savage, when Gideon informs him of the message from 2016. He returns to the group and allows them to rejoin him, clearly seeing how pointless it is to fight them if they want to be there, and he is attacked by Sara, who claims that Rip knew Laurel was going to die, and took them back 5 months later so Sara could not interfere. Sara wants Rip to take her back so she can save her sister, but Rip says he cannot do it. Rip subdues Sara, but it is clearly an issue they will have to deal with. While discussing where Savage could be, Jax asks why an old army helmet in Rip’s office moved, and Rip mentions something about time displacement happening when time ripples, and he checks inside and finds Kendra’s note, giving them the date and location of where she and Savage are. The team heads out, but first Rip speaks to Sara, admitting that if he had not gotten Sara to join the team, Darhk would have killed Sara, Laurel and Captain Lance, so he cannot take her back because she would simply die with the rest of her family. The words are harsh, but Sara finally seems to accept the truth of them.
In France of 1944, the team arrives to find Kendra and Carter, and while they are sprung from Savage’s ship by Firestorm, the rest of the team engages Savage, his future soldiers, and the Nazis they are stealing the meteor from. Firestorm manages to escape with Carter, but Kendra falls behind and is recaptured, and Rip orders everyone to retreat because they are exposing themselves too much to the Nazi’s, and they are outnumbered by Savage’s men. They escape with Carter, who is still a little fuzzy on their identity, but not before Firestorm discovers a new power, the ability to transmutate solid matter into something different.
Back on the ship, Carter tells the group about Savage’s plan to destroy all of time back to Egypt 1700BC, using the meteor rocks and their blood to activate the Thanagarian technology. While the team mulls over how Savage plans to do this, they realize they had already seen a similar meteor rock in 1958. Meanwhile, as Jax and Stein attempt their transmutate ability and fail, Stein inadvertantly says the statement “Third times the charm” and realizes that Savage’s plan must involve the three times Earth and the planet Thanagar align in recent history, in 1958, 1975, and 2021, using the three meteor rocks that Savage has managed to claim (one from Egypt, one from Germany, and one from the little town they visited in 1958). So now the team has a plan, as they are going to spit up into 3 teams, each one tasked with destroying Savage in a different time period, as the radiation from the meteor rock going nuclear will be enough to weaken Savage and halt his immortality (or something like that). And of course, they will be killing three different versions of Savage (which only he can pull off due to his immortality), so somehow this death will be permanent.
So Mick and Ray go to the meteor they found in the US in 1958 and face Savage, with Mick burning the villain alive as Ray manages to shrink the meteor down to microscopic size, thus negating the effects of its explosion. At the same time in 1975 (right outside the meeting of bad guys the team visited in Norway in one of the early episodes), Sara and Firestorm face down Savage and kill him, and then Firestorm transmutates the meteor into harmless water. And lastly, in 2021, Carter and Rick save Kendra and face down, let’s call him Savage prime, with Kendra finally driving a knife into the villain and killing him without any reasonable doubt (as this death finally meets all the qualifications for killing Savage for good), and the rest of the team joins them to face the final meteor, which cannot be shrunk or transmuted. Instead, Rip grabs it with the Waverider and takes it into the heart of the sun, a suicide mission he takes on because he believes with his family gone and Savage dead, he has nothing left to live for. However, after entering the sun (apparently the 
Waverider has AWESOME shielding), Rip has a vision of his family telling him that they love him, and he awakens to Gideon informing him that she is not ready to die. Rip agrees and they somehow manage to jump back to 20 minutes earlier, appearing right as past Rip takes the meteor into the sun.
The team celebrates, and Rip takes them all back to 2016, but not before telling them that he is going to act as the new Warden of the timeline, and inviting the rest to join him if they so desire, giving them some time to think about it like in the pilot episode. Sara visits Laurel’s grave with her dad, who encourages her to go with Rip claiming that Oliver and company can handle things in Star City for now (kind of takes the stakes out of the big ‘Arrow’ finale next week to know that nothing that happens with Darhk will in any way affect the timeline). Rip allows Mick to visit Snart before he left with the team and tell his old partner what a good guy he thinks he is, and Mick surprisingly does not try to warn Snart or alter the timeline. Stein tries to return to life with his wife, but she knows he has wanderlust, especially when she invites Jax into the room and they have a kind of intervention with Stein, letting him know that they know he wants to go, and it is ok.
Ray is onboard for the mission no matter what, so inevitably the full team assembles before Rip and seems to want to join him, all except for Kendra and Carter, who want to live out a simple life now that they do not have Vandal Savage hanging over their heads. They bid farewell to their teammates and take flight, and any Ray/ Kendra shippers (was anyone really rooting f0r them?) saw their hopes dashed. As the team prepares to leave, they spot ANOTHER Waverider in the sky, with the new ship crashing right in front of them (does the Waverider have some hidden stealth mode where you can only see it if you know what it is? I feel like it is flown way too close to populated areas way too often, and I cannot believe more civilians have not seen it). Out from the ship steps a hooded figure who tells the group not to get on their ship, otherwise they will all die, claiming that Mick himself was the one who told him as such in the future. They ask who he is and the man claims his name is Rex Tyler (aka the Hourman from DC Comics), and that he is a member of the Justice Society of America.
And that’s it. Big interesting tease to get us back here for Season 2, because clearly the show is not quality enough to entice viewers back without a hook.
THEORIES FOR TOMORROW:
– I’m done trying to figure out how time travel works on this show. Because in my mind, the three meteors going off still happen at different points in time, not some fake “present” which only seems that way because it is being cut together during editing.
– And now Firestorm can transmutate solid matter? And not even an explanation of how?
– And of course, there is NO explanation why Rip just happened to have that random solider’s helmet in his office on the Waverider.
– I’m still laughing at the notion that the Waverider could fly that deep into the sun and not be utterly destroyed. Do the creative forces behind the sun know anything about science?
The JSA storyline better be spectacular, and the writers better up their game for everything else if they want to keep me around for Season 2, because Season 1 was a mess. I understand you should take some things with a grain of salt while watching a series about superheroes, but there was just so much that did not make sense, aggravating decisions by the characters that defied logic, that made this an especially difficult show to watch. Here’s hoping they get things figured out for Season 2.
@sNick is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles, who belongs to the privileged few who enjoyed the ending to ‘Lost.’ For more of Nick’s thoughts and articles, follow him on Twitter.
