“Legends of Tomorrow” Episode 511 Recap: See Spot Kill

Previously on Legends of Tomorrow, Mick found out he had a teenage daughter, Sara got blasted by a god and survived but ended up in a coma, and the Legends took Astra onto their ship so Charlie could weave her Loom and solve everyone’s problems.

We open with Mick trying to approach her daughter to explain why he missed her soccer game, and Lita almost macing him because ATTA GIRL. He offers to take her to roller derby, but despite ticking off a lot of queer boxes, Lita denies his invitation, making me think maybe she’s straight after all.

Lita starts to make excuses about having to study until Mick stages a big walkout via Timeship and suddenly she is very intrigued by her absent father’s mode of transportation. When he tells her his spaceship can time travel, Lita immediately asks about The Runaways, the lead singer of which is her namesake. (Which also gets her back some gay points, tbh.)

Up on said Waverider, Constantine got over his initial shock and is happy that Astra is on board. She thinks it’s interesting that the team seems to have gone from seeing her as a foe to a friend so quickly, but Constantine says that’s kind of their M.O.

They join up with the rest of the team, who is somewhat impatiently waiting for Charlie to finish meditating.

charlie meditates

Charlie is me trying to sleep and the Legends yapping at/around her are my intrusive thoughts.

Gary busts in just then, as Gary is wont to do, with a Wishbone-esque puppy in tow, which honestly is the most appropriate kind of puppy to be on a timeship. He’s named him Gary Jr. and while he’s not ship broken, he’s still cute. (Side note: “Ship Broken” aka the Legends’ version of house-broken, is the name of this episode. If this was ANY OTHER SHOW, especially in the Arrowverse, I would have assumed someone was going to break up, and on Legends that would have meant Avalance. But I had absolutely no fear of that. Which goes to show how much trust I have in these writers. Trust that’s hard to come by lately.)

Everyone settles in, ready for Charlie to weave for the first time in quite a while, and though Astra and Constantine want Charlie to start with Astra’s mother, everyone else wants her to start with Behrad, except Ava who thinks Charlie should wake Sara up first. They all fight a bit, but when it comes down to it, Charlie chooses Behrad (for her girl Zari, perhaps), so that’s where she begins.

What’s hilarious and adorable is, instead of giving Charlie a wide berth, everyone just dons extreme sunnies to be near her while she weaves. Charlie turns the rings back into the Loom and starts to weave the complicated thread that is the time-traveling, timeline bending, fate defying Behrad.

charlie weaves

Maisie is a literal goddess and you can’t convince me otherwise.

Before she can finish and bring her crush’s brother back, everything kind of explodes and everyone is kicked back a bit.

By the time everyone gets up, the ship is down (except for Gideon) and Charlie admits that she’s never used the Loom on her own. So they turn their energy toward getting the ship back up and running so they can back to moving freely throughout space and time.

While everyone gets to work on that, Ava heads to the med bay to check on her girlfriend. Sara is still unconscious, but Ava still gives her the update. She misses her girl, she misses Captain Lance. Things are bad, and they sure could use a Canary right now.

ava by sara's chairside

Surely Sara has a bed they could have put her in? She doesn’t look particularly comfortable.

Ava kisses Sara’s hand, and as if it was a True Love’s Kiss from a fairytale, Sara comes to. But when she opens her eyes, they aren’t the vibrant baby blues we’re used to seeing. They’re a bit muted and blown out. Ava takes her hand, and Sara is catapulted into a vision of the future where Ava lays dead on the ground.

Sara looks shocked and also blind

“What is this, 2016? AbsoLUTEly not.”

Which is a hearty no-thank-you from me, and probably all parties involved. Sara doesn’t tell Ava about this vision though. Instead, she puts a blindfold on, shrugging off Ava’s worries about her newfound blindness. First of all, she’s a trained assassin; the loss of one sense or limb isn’t enough to break her stride. Second of all, after all they’ve been through? This is nothing. This will require adjustment, but it is not the end of the world. Sara would know.

Sara takes it in stride

“Ava, calm down, I’ve died 900 times, a little loss of sight is honestly barely pinging my radar at this point.”

While blindfolded and strolling proudly alongside her girlfriend, Sara meets Lita. She’s surprised Mick’s teenage daughter is on her timeship, but takes it in stride. Well, that is, until she shakes Lita’s hand and gets a vision of Mick dead on the ground. She quickly shakes it off though, and focuses on Lita’s words instead: It’s cool that a woman is in charge. Which maybe shouldn’t be a thing we have to say out loud in 2020 but frankly it is. And it is, indeed, cool.

After meeting this child, Sara hears a dog barking, and truly wonders what her girlfriend has been up to in her relatively brief absence.

Elsewhere on the ship, Astra approaches Zari with a proposition. Behrad’s thread was complicated because of all the time travel and timeline manipulation; Charlie was hundreds of years out of practice…what if Charlie started with something simpler? Like Astra’s mother? And Astra knows no one would bite on this plan if SHE suggested it…Zari (technically new but not like…NEW) catches on and dutifully agrees to broach the topic herself.

Meanwhile, Mick is slowly but surely winning Lita over, by being aware of the French Revolution (read: being part of it) and by bringing in Nate and his steely skull to help her study.

Since Gideon can’t scan Sara right now, Ava takes her to Constantine to see if there’s something magical afoot. But when he grabs her chin to inspect her eyes, Sara gets a vision of Constantine lying dead, just like she saw Ava and Mick. But, still unsure what to make of it all, she lies and says she’s fine.

Before she finds out by hearing her sultry, sultry voice, Constantine warns Sara that Astra is on the ship, too. Sara immediately panics. “What if she goes on a stabbing spree?!” Ava thinks this is an awfully specific anxiety, and tries to calm her girlfriend down; Astra is here as an ally.

In an effort to get the Waverider back up and running again, Sara tries to walk Ava through fixing the ship when Charlie comes to check on the captain. There’s this brief, subtle moment when Ava holds her hands up like she wants to help Sara but then realizes Sara doesn’t need help so she puts her hands down and it’s very cute. Sara promises Charlie things are fine, nothing to see here. Get it!

sara serves tude

I love that Sara can serve ‘tude with half her face covered.

But Charlie knows that her going blind soon after being blinded by a god is fishy timing at best. Charlie finally gets Sara to fess up, and she admits that when she touches somebody, she sees them stabbed to death. Even when she brings her hand to her own face, she sees bodies strewn across the floor. Charlie says she has future sight, but Sara won’t hear it.

Charlie doesn’t understand why; why is the wielder of the Death Totem and Paragon of Destiny who has been brought back to life countless times and is dating a cl*ne and talking to an ancient deity shapeshifter having a hard time believing she could be having premonitions? And that’s when Sara finally admits what she’s seeing.

sara feels ava's shirt

“I see this shirt on the floor later. AND NOT IN THE SEXY WAY.”

And why she refuses to believe it. “We don’t all die.” That’s not the fate she wants for her family.

Charlie assumes that it must be Astra, because whomst among them would turn on them besides the hitchhiker they picked up in hell. Ava doesn’t want to just assume, but Zari strolls in and tells them how Astra tried to manipulate her, and Gary found the ring case empty in the trash, so even Ava has to admit that things aren’t looking good for dear ol’ Astra.

Ava, Charlie and Sara

Look it’s another unkillable gay squad!

They put Astra in the holding cell, which she takes high offense to, but only Constantine is on her side of this.

astra splays out

Hot. as. hell.

Mick is still trying to win over his daughter, who was unimpressed by his guns and his proclivity for stealing, but wouldn’t hate seeing an actual artifact from the literal French Revolution, so she starts to warm to him. (At this point I thought Lita swiped the rings not knowing what they were and being a klepto like her father. I was very, very wrong.) When she sees all the things he’s nicked, she thinks Mick should invest it, maybe back when the banks were first started, and Mick realizes she’s not ready for time travel or his treasure room.

Sara, Ava, and Zari head back to the server room to try to figure out what’s going on.

sara, ava, zari

“Maybe this is Lex Luthor’s fault.”

Sara has another vision, and this time she sees her own reflection in the knife’s reflection, and she knows that she’s the one who is going to kill everyone.

sara the knife

This is the point I had to look up the director. Her name is Andi Armaganian and I’m officially a fan.

Ava is like, “Okay but just don’t?” but Sara has been sleeper celled before so she panics and tells everyone to leave her locked in the med bay and to not let her out under any circumstances. Captain’s orders.

sara is blindfolded

Bird Box (2018)

Ava gives her an “I love you” and her word and leaves her girlfriend in voluntary quarantine.

Despite having Astra in her ear, Zari channels the flannel-clad version of herself and starts hacking the security footage to see who stole the rings, all while giving Astra advice on how to gain the Legends’ trust. After all, very few if any of them come from squeaky clean backgrounds. They are not here to judge, but they ARE going to take precautions.

Zari finds some footage and sees Charlie taking the rings, then Zari throwing them away, and Nate asks them if they’re in cahoots, and oh how I wish the answer was yes. But they both deny having done the things they’re watching themselves do, and Nate believes it when he sees himself destroying Gideon’s fabricator. Charlie watches herself flush the rings down the toilet, and cannot believe her eyes.

charlie gasps in surprise

Me realizing there really is only one toilet on the Waverider.

Astra, from the brig, says that it’s clearly not her, so maybe let her out now, but they haven’t ruled out mind control, which sounds like a hellish trick, so she’s staying locked up for now.

In the med bay, Gary breaks social distancing rules to leave Gary Jr. with Sara so she can have some emotional support while in isolation.

Sara cuddles wishbone

“What’s the story Wishbone? Do you think it’s worth a look? It kinda seems familiar like a story from a book true crime podcast.”

But before he can leave her, Sara snaps Gary’s neck. A voice says, “Kill them all,” and she takes off her blindfold and prepares to do just that.

sara looks murdery

She can’t see well, but she looks good. :fingerguns:

Sara shakes her head and realizes she just had an awful vision, throws the dog back at Gary, and says his dog is a demon. She yells at the dog that she won’t listen to him and runs to find her team.

She starts shouting about how Gary’s dog wants her to kill everyone and Gary being alive proves she’s telling the truth, which frankly would sound insane on any other show, but here the logic tracks for me. Zari and Charlie review the footage again and see that Gary Jr. is there every time one of them was doing something shifty, at which time Gary admits that he “rescued” Gary Jr. from hell.

Ava says this sounds like something from the Son of Sam episode of her true crime podcast StabCast, and they realize that this hellhound is literally the dog that made David Berkowitz murder people.

And currently, he’s trying to get Nate to murder his friends.

zari and charlie look scared

“Just because people ship us more than they ship you with anyone doesn’t mean you have to KILL us!”

Gary Jr. calls himself the Canine of Chaos and turns from Wishbone into a demon dog, sending everyone scurrying into Astra’s cell to protect themselves from him.

Sara and Constantine are on the outside though, and they realize Sara’s visions were right all along.

Once they’re safe, Astra says she knows how to get rid of this dog, and Zari defends Astra, saying that they should let her out because she was telling the truth all along, but as soon as they do, Astra locks them in tighter, and struts off in her hell-red suit.

astra on an ipad

Astra would rearrange your Animal Crossing island so it’s disorganized chaos and smile the whole time.

Sara decides to lean into this premonition situation and grabs Constantine’s hands. She sees Mick getting eaten by the dog in the library, so they run there and save Mick and Lita. Constantine gets the dog to chase him instead, because he has Sara to protect him, and Sara is like, “I can’t see?” but Constantine knows she doesn’t need those beautiful baby blues to kick ass.

sara listens

I’m sure this will come as a shock to you, but this gave me big Buffy vibes.

Constantine needs to know the dog’s true name to send it back to hell, and luckily Astra shows up just in time with that information.

Slowly they start picking up the pieces of their day. They get Gideon back online, Gary digs the rings out of the waste system, and also gets a new emotional support fluffball that he says is a bunny but also says he can’t feed after midnight.

Ava is rightly suspicious.

Mick tries to have a heart to heart with Lita, but she doesn’t need to hear it. She understands him better after spending the day with him. And she wants to stay the rest of the weekend. She even calls him, “Dad.” It’s very sweet.

Lita smiles

Wait til she gets back to school and tells her friends about her badass Aunt Sara.

Zari and Astra face off again, and Zari tries to reason with her, tries to get her to just give in and be her friend, but Astra won’t bite.

Zari smiles

“I can be your two best friends, if you let me. Sometimes we have donuts.”

She does give Zari points for trying, and almost looks like she hates that she pushed her away as soon as she did it.

astra sips

I hope we get to keep Astra for a little while. In fact…let’s trade her for Constantine.

Ava and Sara stroll down the hallway of the ship toward the med bay to see if they can figure out what happened to Sara’s eyesight, joking about what they’ll do with blindfolds later, Sara getting a sneak peak of it and liking what she sees.

sara and ava giggle

I trust this show with these two so much that even though the name of this episode was “Ship Broken” I never feared for this particular ship even a little.

And Gideon can’t sense anything physically wrong with her. Which I dig, if their point is, she just can’t see now. Nothing wrong with that. I have a feeling eventually she’ll be able to tune her foresight into being as good as regular sight, because I can’t imagine they’ll hide those perfect eyeballs forever, but I did love that, while surprising and requiring some adjustment, it wasn’t really all that big a deal that Sara couldn’t see. I also liked that they continue to call back to her time with the League of Assassins.

This episode was technically a bottle episode, since they didn’t leave the ship, and it had everything I love about this show. Sara being the captain, ensemble balance, humor, a mystery, supernatural shenanigans, a historical tie-in, and queer ladies in love. And they didn’t even time travel! It was a perfectly Legends episode and I loved it very much.

Next week, we’re back to traveling around and we get to see our fam as Greeks. No, not like ancient Greeks, like frat boys and sorority girls. And I, for one, can’t wait.

Pages: 1 2See entire article on one page

Before you go! Autostraddle runs on the reader support of our AF+ Members. If this article meant something to you today — if it informed you or made you smile or feel seen, will you consider joining AF and supporting the people who make this queer media site possible?

Join AF+!

Valerie Anne

Just a TV-loving, Twitter-addicted nerd who loves reading, watching, and writing about stories. One part Kara Danvers, two parts Waverly Earp, a dash of Cosima and an extra helping of my own brand of weirdo.

Valerie has written 593 articles for us.

6 Comments

  1. Another great episode and another hilarious review! I’m all there for next week’s episode. This is honestly exactly the show I need right now.

    Your caption about Sara still throwing ‘tude with half her face covered was spot on. She’s definitely ready to Captain in Quarantine when the other half of her face will be covered.

    Also, did anyone else notice how when Sara and Ava are joking around about what they’re going to do with blindfolds later, Ava is literally STRAIGHTENING OUT AND PLAYING with one of Sara’s FINGERS?!

    I’m sorry, maybe I’m still on autosubtext mode from watching too much Xena, but I’m having trouble not reading into that rather suggestive hand-holding there.

  2. So did anyone else notice when Nate comes in to help Mick with his daughter’s studies he says “can’t study without sex right?” Supposed to be snacks but even when using voice to text technology it dictates sex instead of snacks. He quickly rebounds by saying Gideon makes the best snacks.

    • Seriously, how old is she supposed to be? Because that interaction was not played on a way that would be ok if she is still in high school.

  3. Thank you for your great reviews!!!
    I love watching the show then come here for the reviews, they are the funniest.
    I think this season is the best one yet.

  4. I loved this episode. Normally a bottle episode is equal parts filler and budget saving, but this one wasn’t. It kept everyone in the same place to accelerate Astra’s application to be a Legend.

    —-

    Many compositors died to bring us the Loom of Fate effect.

    “WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY’RE ALL WEARING REFLECTIVE SUNGLASSES!?”

    —-

    Over on the Supergirl review I made an off hand remark that Lena should join the Legends, and someone countered with how at odds her sense of style would be (sharp suits and heels) would be with the rest of the crew.

    (Gestures at Astra’s outfit).

    —-

    Anyone else shipping Zari/Astra? They can bond over the trauma of their hijacked childhoods.

    —-

    “They’re all good dogs, Brent.”
    “He’s literally a hell hound.”
    “A h*cking good dog.”

Comments are closed.