It’s the most wonderful time of year. No, not the holidays, but rather, the annual The Flash and Arrow crossover! “Legends of Yesterday” picks up right where “Legends of Today” left off on The Flash. “Legends of Yesterday” is a lot more focused and better episode than “Legends of Today.” It’s not any less busy though, so let’s just dive right into the craziness.
Ill Fated Ventures
Oliver and crew take Kendra and Carter to a farm house outside Central City. If this sounds like the very boring part from The Avengers: Age of Ultron, Thea agrees with you and makes a perfect quip referencing the Marvel movie. (Hold on to that joke Thea fans, because it is the only thing of note she does for the whole episode.) Anyway, Carter breaks off with Kendra to train her in new hawkperson powers. He even has a nice suit on hand. It doesn’t go so great though.
Oliver, meanwhile, splits off to track down his ex-girlfriend, Samantha, and her son. Samantha tells Oliver that her son William is not his, but Oliver isn’t buying it. He takes a strand of hair off William’s baseball hat to test it. Malcolm calls Oliver and tells him that he has arranged a meeting with Vandal Savage. Barry, Oliver and Malcolm attend the meeting.
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The meeting is pretty much just an excuse to have some exposition and have Vandal Savage threaten our heroes. Vandal tells Oliver and Barry that they have 24 hours to hand him Kendra and Carter or he will destroy Central City. Then when Vandal is done with Central City he will turn his focus on Star City.
The time limit gives Oliver, Barry and Kendra the time to freak out. Barry worries that he is going to time travel again because he saw a ghost of himself while running earlier. Kendra feels guilty about everyone willing to fight for her and Carter’s lives. Carter helps the situation not at all.
Everything Goes to Hell…
Oliver investigates William and Samantha some more. Thanks to Barry’s DNA test, he discovers that William is, in fact, his son. Oliver goes to Samantha and she admits that it’s true. Samantha still doesn’t want Oliver in William’s life though. Even if he is different person now, his life is still crazy. This is a fair point. What’s not a fair point is Samantha’s next demand. She tells Oliver that if he wants to be a part of William’s life, he can’t tell anyone in his life about his son. The problem with that request is that Felicity has already seen the DNA results from Barry’s test.
This all ends is a stupidly pointless angst filled scene where Felicity confronts Oliver. Oliver acts distant and lies repeatedly. Felicity gets understandably upset and essentially breaks up with Ollie. The biggest casualty of this scene is not Oliver and Felicity’s relationship but my eyeballs. They have rolled so far that they fall out of my head.
Oliver goes off with Barry, Kendra and Carter to confront Savage. The trio plans to double-cross Vandal at the meeting and kill him. This plan doesn’t work, to put it extremely lightly. In fact, everyone kind of dies. And I mean everyone; Kendra, Carter, Oliver, Laurel, Felicity, Dig and Thea. They all get super dead. Barry is the only one to escape by running fast, really fast. So fast that he goes back in time, to the point in the episode where everyone wasn’t dead, the meeting with Vandal Savage.
… And Back Again
If you’re brain hasn’t exploded from all that craziness, I’m sure you see where the episode is headed now. Barry, naturally, opens up to Oliver about the whole thing. Barry tells Oliver everything that happened and how everything went wrong. So Oliver’s solution is a rather simple one. They just do things differently. So Cisco trains Kendra, not Carter. It is because of Cisco that Kendra has access to all the memories from her first life.
Flashback Break (Egyptian Style)
We go back to ancient Egypt for this flashback. Kendra is the priestess, Shayera and Carter the prince, Khufu. This flashback explains their whole history. Well their whole history expect the reasoning behind Carter being a super white dude and a prince of Egypt.
Shayera and Khufu were lovers and Vandal Savage, a jealous adviser. Vandal Savage murdered both Shayera and Khufu. On their death beds, the lovers said a prayer to the Egyptian god, Horace, who has the face of bird. This put into motion the cycle of killings, resurrections and wings for Carter and Kendra.
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Time Travel Consequences
The memories allow Kendra the knowledge they need to defeat Vandal Savage. There is a lot of fast talking at this point and its science fast talk so I get roughly 10% of it. The main gist of it is that Team Green Arrow has a way now to beat Vandal Savage. Vandal Savage is killed in a big battle between Team Green Arrow, Hawkgirl, Hawkman and The Flash.
This of course just leaves the baby mama drama. Time has been reset but Samantha’s dumb rules haven’t changed. Barry even affirms them by saying they’ve changed too much already. So Oliver agrees to Samantha’s terms. He will be a part of William’s life but not tell anyone about the boy. Essentially we are just delaying the big Felicity break up scene then because that is all something we want to see…
Also Malcolm puts Vandal Savage’s ashes into an urn. So that will probably also lead to terrible things down the road.
Arrow airs Wednesdays at 8pm on The CW
(Image courtesy of The CW)
Contributing Writer, BuddyTV
Derek is a Philadelphia based writer and unabashed TV and comic book junkie. The time he doesn’t spend over analyzing all things nerdy he is working on his resume to be the liaison to the Justice League.
