LEGENDS OF TOMORROW Review 3.03 “Phone Home”
Read the previous review here.
This post contains spoilers for Legends of Tomorrow.
Legends of Tomorrow has always been a show that intended to be in constant flux. Because of that, we frequently see changes within the team. We’ve seen several exits met with new additions, and season three will be no exception to the rule. “Phone Home” brings in Zari, a Muslim hacktivist from 2049. She’s not there to replace any of Legends necessarily, but we will see Martin Stein exit the show later on in the season. While the news is sad, we never deserved Victor Garber to begin with.
The time that Zari comes from is a complicated one. How complicated? Well, we were only there for a few minutes, but in that time we discovered that both being a Meta and practicing a religion are illegal. Now, not everyone has Metahuman abilities, but a large sum of folks believe in one thing or another, regardless of what that belief may be. Argus leads this authoritarian future, running things as a police state and killing or capturing anyone who stands in their way. Those lucky enough to be Metas also get to be experimented on! 2049 sounds super fun.
The Legends being who they are find that they cannot abide these behaviors and stray from their mission to simply save Zari from Kuasa’s attacks. Jax frees all of the Metas in the Argus facility, making things even more of a mess for the Time Bureau. Agent Sharpe and Co already didn’t care for the Legends, but further botching time and eventually playing time ship chicken with them really didn’t help their sunny dispositions.
By the end of “Phone Home” we get more of a look into just how complicated Zari’s life has been. She lied to the Legends to get their help breaking into the Argus facility to steal her brother’s totem, which he was murdered for. When fleeing from them to meet her family at their rendezvous point, she finds it in ruins and her family gone. The episode didn’t take much time exploring her hacktivist history, but there’s plenty of time for that in the coming episodes.
While most of the Legends were dealing with the Zari vs Kuasa vs Argus’ police state situation, Nate and Amaya remained on the ship to try to deal with her little totem problem. Amaya gets the job done on her vision quest, but Nate had a less functional reaction to the root Gideon synthesized for them. High Nate? The best Nate. Annoyed at high Nate trying to touch her Sara? The best Sara. Legends of Tomorrow continues to play a balancing act with humor and high stakes and it’s doing tremendously.
On her quest, Amaya is told by her ancestor that she is tied to Zari and must both trust in her totem and protect this new player in their lives. When the final showdown of the episode takes place, Amaya is no longer afraid and Kuasa retreats, leaving Amaya with more questions, and a new teammate to look after.
I’m going to take the liberty of assuming that we don’t need to discuss the Nate and Amaya situation, and that we can all agree that regardless of where it goes, it just needs to get there and be done with it. Besides, by putting that aside we can talk about how Sara told Mick that something was an order and he listened. Or the fact that both Nate and Stein tried to explain a mythical totem to the wielder of said totem and “Phone Home” called out the mansplaining of it all.
The Legends have a whole lot of problems in their future (including the Time Bureau, which really wants them to stop, and this time there will be consequences, they mean it), and if they continue to have episodes that drive the story forward while still being utterly hilarious it’s going to be one hell of a ride getting there. Next week we even get a Halloween episode!
