"The Virgin Gary" – DC's Legends of Tomorrow S04E01

Oh, Legends, how we missed you.

Okay, well some of us did. Okay, well, I did. I'm hoping I'm not the only one. Although the Legends team did gaslight their (Time Bureau) ratings a couple of times.

As other reviewers on the 'net have noted, Legends has gone from the least of the Arrowverse shows to the best. Part of that has been a slow decrease in quality of the other shows. Part of that was Legends was the last of the four current shows to drop and often gets short shrift from the CW with its' 16-, 17-, and 18-episode seasons compared to Flash and Arrow and Supergirl. Part of it is that it was sort of a catch-all for characters who never quite took off on the shows that they premiered on. Ray, Sara, and Mick all come to mind.

But the fun about Legends, and what it has slowly grown into after a rocky first year (Vandal Savage and the Hawks, anyone?), is that it's a flat-out balls-to-the walls farce. Yes, there's drama and character development and deep personal moments: "Virgin" has several. And arguably those land harder because they're surrounded by so much damn comedy.

After all, where else will you see Dominic Purcell tell a human-sized rat that he loves it?

But let's provide some context. After a weird opening where the Beatles are arriving in America and Paul Revere warps through time to warn that "the British are coming!" (see what they did there?), the team wraps up four months of anomaly-resolving and are bored. The monsters Constantine (Matt Ryan) warned about still haven't popped up.

Ava (now-series regular Jes Macallan) summons the term to the Time Bureau HQ in DC in 2018. Where the Time Bureau throws the Legends a surprise party for having resolved all of the anachronisms they caused. Ava has sex with Sara (Caity Lotz) and they consider whether Sara should move in with Ava. Mick is growling at everyone and looking for the open bar. Ray (Brandon Routh) is unhappy Nora Dahrk (Courtney Ford) is being hunted by the Time Bureau, and not-so-subtlety lets slip to Zari (Tala Ashe) that he let Nora go in the hopes that she'd turn over a new leaf. Zari is all understanding and "Ooh, Ray, you have a big heart", and it's nice to see the two of them pairing off.

Nate (Nick Zano) and Mick decide to go off on a robbery, and they end up at the DC house of Nate's parents, Henry (Thomas J. Wilson) and Dorothy (Sarah Hogan). Dorothy is all impressed with Mick and invites the "boys" to have some sandwiches. Nate and Henry don't get on so well, and despite several past references to Back to the Future, nobody comments how Henry looks like a much older Biff Tannen.

Constantine drops in on Sara and tells her the magical monsters that were unleashed when the team freed Mallus last season are finally breaking loose. Sara doesn't want to hear it now that she has a chance at a normal life with Ava and shoos him out. However, the team eventually learns independently of each other that there was a "Woodstock Massacre" in 1969.

The team (somehow) gets there individually or in pairs, then all join up with a cute split-screening effect. Ray and Zari have found a hippie corpse with its heart eaten out. The Legends soon discover a unicorn is responsible. It's all beauty and butterflies and rainbows... until it sprays the Legends with rainbow goop, impales another hippie through the chest with its horn, and eats her heart.

The goop causes hallucinations, so Nate sees Mick as Henry, and Mick sees Nate as Axl, his dead rat from last season. Leading to the "I love you" declaration mentioned earlier and my first LOL moment. Ray briefly hallucinates Nora, in her "Special Appearance by" for this episode. Zari waves her hand in front of her face and does the "The colors! The colors!" bit. Sara is unaffected, but I suppose League of Assassins training includes resisting drugs.

Constantine arrives and figures out they need a spell to send the unicorn back to the hell from whence it came. That involves three spell ingredients the Legends have to steal from Jerry Garcia, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin. Nate has to get the saliva of a nine-fingered man (Garcia is missing a finger) by the expedient of stealing his doobie and running like the wind, for a second LOL moment.

Finally Constantine needs a virgin, and they grab Time Agent Gary (Adam Tsekhman). Unicorns are drawn to pomegranates for some unstated reason, so the Legends give Gary a pomegranate and use him as bait. Constantine moans a bit about how everyone who gets close to him dies. The unicorn approaches Gary, Constantine casts the spell, and the unicorn is sucked to hell after biting off Gary's nipple. Leading to another LOL moment when Gary compares losing his nipple to Hell, to Constantine losing his soul to Hell sometimes down the road.

In the end, Nate reconciles with his father over beer. Maybe he should have offered him a sports almanac?

Zari takes Ray to see herself as a child with her mother, playing in the park. Ray is all worried that the Time Bureau will capture Nora and there's nothing he can do. So Zari tells him she's all worried there's nothing she can do to prevent her younger self from being sucked into the future U.S. where (I guess) Middle Easterns are illegal. And that's from so early last season (almost a year ago exactly) that I barely remember what was going on in that dark dystopian future. Which doesn't help what I think is the political message the creative team is trying to convey.

Sara decides it'd be better if she and Ava took it slowly, both because she thinks the Legends need her and because (unstated) she seems uncomfortable with her and Ava moving so quickly.

Constantine is all surly and grumpy, and doesn't want to be part of the Legends. Even Sara can't talk him out of his funk. At the end, some invisible demonic force twists and turns his body and then writes an ominous message on his mirror.

Judging from the previews, next week will be another fractured fairy tale as a bad-tempered fairy godmother shows up at the Salem witch trials.

"Virgin" is filled with injokes and fourth-wall-breaking gags. Ray talks about boosting their ratings. Mick says he always wants to punch Englishmen in the face (Dominic Purcell is British). You've got Thomas J. Wilson as the father of a time traveler. There's the split-screening, and the weird appearances of Garcia, Hendrix, and Joplin.

But the drama still lands. Tala Ashe has improved quite a bit as an actress since she joined the show, and she hit her groove (or the creative team hit their groove with her) since last year's "Here I Go Again". the Sara/Constantine pairing is a bit old hat, but it was entertaining watching Ashe and Routh pair off, and Zano and Purcell as well.

They're apparently going to add a few more team members. But they've been playing it a bit cagey. And Ryan and Ford are credited as "Special Appearance by" rather than main stars, which suggests that they're not going to be appearing every week. Maisie Richardson-Sellers isn't listed either, and she's supposed to show up as a new character later this season, too.

Ryan as Constantine is the standout, though. But then again, he always has been as Constantine: on his own NBC show, in the Justice League Dark direct-to-video movie, in his CW seed show, and on Arrow. It's hard to imagine anyone else playing the character at this point, and I for one wouldn't want anyone else to try. Keanu Reeves, get thee hence.

Overall, Legends doesn't do anything different from its premiere. But that doesn't mean much, either. They started semi-seriously at the beginning of season 3, too, and by the end we had John Noble as himself and a giant-sized Beebo. It's hard to imagine they'll find a way to top themselves, but they pulled it off last year and I suspect they'll somehow do it again this season.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?

-----

Sadly, with Legends starting, that means my Monday night dance card is pretty much full. So no Arrow reviews until Legends ends. It sounds like it'll be ending after a shorter season, so maybe I'll play catch-up with Arrow once Legends is over. We'll see.