Previously on Legends of Tomorrow, the team almost finally defeated Savage, but Kendra stopped before delivering the fatal blow to save a version of Carter, who hadn’t remembered who he was yet.
Snart, Rory, and Sara are a little salty that Savage is still alive, considering killing him was the whole point of this whole mission. They pass a bottle around and glaring in Kendra and Rip’s general direction.
They’re down for killing Savage despite what that might mean for Carter, but the rest of the team is more hesitant.
Ray and Jax pop in and say that they’ve discovered that Savage was using technology too advanced for even his future, and Rip gets excited because now the Time Masters might actually listen to him about the dangers of Vandal Savage. So off to the edge of the universe they go.
Rip goes to the brig and asks Savage how he time traveled. Once he learned that it was possible from Rip, he dedicated his extra-long life to figuring out how. He calls himself a master of time, pissing Rip off enough to thrust the Waverider into high gear, despite Gideon’s recommendation.
Sara asks Rip if he’s overdoing it, considering the ship is shaking and making terrible noises. Then asks flat out if she’s doing this for everyone or for his family.
And sure enough, as soon as reassuring words come out of Rip’s mouth, the power flickers. In his cell, Savage smiles…well, savagely.
Rip realizes the time drive is busted, so he sends Jax to fix it while Sara checks on Savage.
As Sara checks the security of Savage’s cell, he asks her if she’s talked to Laurel lately. She thinks he’s just bragging about how much he knows about Team Legends, because she still doesn’t know that back in the world she left behind, her sister is gone. (Even though technically Sara could re-enter that time stream and save her sister, right? Timey wimey.)
Anyway, Sara’s not afraid of Savage. He’s just another Ra’s al Ghul/Malcolm Merlyn/generic broody bad guy.
Savage asks her why she trusts Rip, since it seems obvious he chose people he could easily manipulate, but she just walks out.
While fixing the time drive, Jax gets knocked down by a wave of radiation, causing a flashback about the day he left on this adventure, the last time he saw his mother. Stein and Rip take him to the media bay, but Gideon says he’s aging rapidly, and nothing will fix him.
Sara tells Rip that Savage thinks Rip would sell them all out to save his family, and maybe Rip would have denied it before, but after seeing what his reckless decision just did to Jax, he isn’t so sure. Sara is appalled.
When just talking isn’t helping Carter remember who he is, Kendra shows him a picture of Aldus, telling him it’s their son. Which…I can understand why he was hesitant to believe that two 20-somethings had a 60-year-old son. He uses his legs to attack Kendra, which earns him a punch in the face from Ray. Fed up, Ray storms off to demand answers from Savage.
Savage understands Ray’s plight; he too fell in love with Chay-ara, and even a version of Kendra, who didn’t remember her past lives once. Which…ew. Savage says they’re in the same boat, which is not a vessel Ray has any interest in, to be honest.
Flashback to Ray’s last day in 2016, where Felicity is back in her wheelchair. (Which confuses me about the timeline even more than I already was.) She tells Ray a time-travel mission sounds dangerous, and that he doesn’t have to leave.
Ray wants to make the world a better place and thinks he can do that better on the spaceship than he could here at Palmer tech, where Felicity seems to be handling things just fine. She kisses him on the cheek and tells him to come back soon. He also says he doesn’t plan on falling in love or letting an annoying love triangle take away from the plot of the show, but we all know how that worked out.
When present-day Ray goes to see Kendra, she’s reciting a poem about eternal love to Carter, and he realizes maybe Savage was right about loving Kendra being a curse. Kendra tells him to stop being an impressionable youth, but Ray just starts singing O-Town‘s “All or Nothing” and won’t listen to Kendra’s pleading.
Snart and Rory are pissed about everything that’s going on, so they try to convince Rip to kill Savage. Rip says they’re free to use the jumpship to quit Team Legends if they want, and they set off to do just that, but Sara hangs back. She’s not the kind of person to quit when the going gets rough.
Then, it’s the scene we’ve all been waiting for. For years, it feels like. A flashback to Sara goes to see Nyssa, who is as excited to see her as I am to see them both in the same room (well, cell).
Nyssa can’t believe her eyes, and puts her hands gently on Sara’s face, so amazed that the feral creature that leaped out of the Lazarus Pit is gone, and her beloved is back. Sara wants to help free Nyssa, somehow.
But Nyssa says she made her own choices, and the only way Sara can help her is to go off and live her life. Kick some asses, kiss some nurses, live her best life. If you love me, you’ll leave. The ultimate paradox.
They wrap their arms around each other for the first time in far too long, and possibly the last time.
Sara cries, I cry, we all cry.
It’s Stein’s turn to go talk to Savage; he wants the key to immortality sharing so he can save Jax. Savage doesn’t give Stein any answers directly, but their conversation gives Stein an idea, and he goes to rig the jumpship to be able to cure Jax while sending him back to 2016. Jax says Stein won’t survive without him, but Stein is willing to sacrifice his own well-being for Jax. He does ask his counterpart to say goodbye to his wife for him, because he had promised his wife he’d be right back when he left to travel through space and time.
Snart and Rory come to take the jumpship and are less than pleased to find that it’s gone and that now they have to actually join this fight.
Ray goes back to Savage to try to convince him, and himself, that he’s fine with whatever Kendra chooses because her life is her own, but Savage knows all the buttons to push to flare up Ray’s ego and get him to open the door. Just…dumb. Dumb dumb dumb. We need more badass chicks on this show because obviously the boys can’t be left to their own devices. Savage easily puts Ray down and leaves his cell.
When Ray comes to, he stumbles into the engine room to warn the others that Savage escaped, but they would have figured it out in a second anyway because Savage manages to shut down Gideon. So they have to fly the ship the old-fashioned way, with Stein as an engineer and Sara as a navigator.
She doesn’t really know anything about navigating spaceships, but she knows a dozen languages and can make tough calls under pressure, so she’s their best bet.
Half the team fights while the other half flights. Rip hears the fight with Savage getting louder and closer to the cockpit, so he decides he’s going into the trenches to clean up his own mess, meaning Sara is going to have to captain the ship.
Everyone gets knocked out except Kendra, and when Savage grabs her by the throat, Carter wakes up like a sleeper cell and spreads his wings, saving Kendra. He gets stabbed almost immediately, but it was enough to get Kendra back on her feet, and she beats the crap out of Savage, knocking him out. And Carter is still breathing, so Kendra saved the day.
They make it to the Vanishing Point, so Rip goes to take Savage to be judged among a jury of Time Masters. While in transit, Savage asks how he got out of his cell back in ancient Egypt, and Rip says that he bribed a guard with a boob pen, because of course he did.
Kendra finds Ray, who ends things with her, saying it’s better to have loved and lost than go on thinking you’ll never be able to love again at all.
Rip presents Vandal Savage to the Time Masters, along with proof he manipulated time, and he’s feeling pretty proud of himself. Until the Time Masters release Savage. They’re working together, and now Rip is the prisoner.
On the ship, Sara and Snart are playing cards when Snart hears the Time Master guards march in.
They hide while everyone else gets arrested. So the Dynamic Duo might be our only hope.
What did you think of “River of Time”?
