Legends of Tomorrow, “White Knights” recap

12 Feb

Hello again! So the team has had its share of problems on its mission to stop Vandal Savage from taking over future Earth. One has been saving Kendra after her wounding at the hands of Savage, another is that Sara is not completely clear of that nasty urge to kill people after being resurrected in the Lazarus Pit. But that aside, the team is about to follow their next lead on Savage into the 1980’s! So dust off your 80’s mix tapes, people!

1986. The Waverider pops up in 1986, and Gideon lets us know what they are looking for: a file that points to Savage’s whereabouts, but the memo that mentions the file is heavily redacted by the U.S. Government. So the solution is steal the file…from the Pentagon! That involves the following: Ray and Cold playing janitors, Sara and Kendra playing military officials, Heatwave distracting the soldiers with some arm wrestling bets, and Firestorm cutting the power. And that starts going bad when Jax torches the wrong power line and puts the whole place. And while everyone is getting out, Kendra goes all blood-rage on some hapless security guard. They get the file, but suffice to say, in the opposite way Rip would have preferred this theft would go.

Seeing Red. Back on the Waverider, Jax and Stein are bickering with each other, and Sara is giving crap to Kendra for going all Hawkcrazy. But let’s get to the big info the group discovers: that Savage decided after his run-in with the team in the 70’s, to go to a new venue to continue being evil, in the Soviet Union! So that can’t go well for Earth history if he does that, so the Waverider is sent to Russia. On the way, Chronos pops up in a ship and starts attacking them. Rip decides to uncloak the ship, to attract the now in range Russian Air Force to intercept. As Russian MiGs fire missiles on the Waverider, Rip orders the ship’s engines cut off, sending the heat-seeking missiles to its nearest target: Chronos’ ship! Chronos ship goes down after being hit, and the Waverider is forced to crash land in a forest. Good news is that the cloaking device still works, so that’s one less thing to worry about.

I hope the Waverider has insurance to cover crash landings.

Crash Landing. As the team is recovering from that Flash, Stein lets them all know what he’s found in the file. Savage has employed a Russian scientist, Valentina Vostok, to help with a project called Svarog, whose name is fire-related (put a pin on that for later…). Cold suggests killing the doctor, but Ray thinks she may just be an unaware pawn of Savage. So Rip suggests finding out what they can by disguising themselves as potential allies, with a little help from some swallowable language-translator pills, and–woila!–Ray and Cold can speak Russian. Sara is a bit concerned about Kendra accidentally channeling her inner goddess again in the field, so Rip thinks the solution is for Sara to give her some of the League of Assassins training tips to help out.

Gideon reports that Chronos’ ship has crash landed a good distance away, but its not destroyed. To make sure things are okay, Rip takes Heatwave with him to make sure Chronos is dead. After a walk in the woods, they instead find a familiar face to Rip in his Time Masters mentor, Druce. Druce tells Rip Chronos is dead, and has an offer for his former protege: give up this mission, and the Time Masters will handle Savage, and return the team safely back to their own time. Rip says he needs to confer with his teammates on this, and on the way back, Heatwave says that proposal sounds like a trap. But Rip trusts Druce, so that can’t be the case, yeah?

Kendra is either channeling her inner Hawk goddess or Beyonce, and I don’t know which one is more dangerous.

Dance Partners. Ray and Cold find Valentina going to a local ballet, and Ray’s attempt at small talk go really, REALLY bad. It goes so bad that Cold steps in, and proves to be quite the Casanova. After a while, she leaves, but not without Cold stealing her access card to her workplace…and her wallet! Mr. Snart is quite the multitasker! Back on the Waverider, Sara tries some simple staff training on Kendra, who’s not comfortable with fighting after what happened at the Pentagon. So Sara pushes Kendra like a tough-ass drill sergeant to bring out the fierceness. And when Kendra does, she snaps back to normal when Sara almost loses her crap and tries to kill her! Great plan, Rip: throw the two most uncontrolled violent people at each other.

Speaking of Rip’s plans, he tells Jax and Stein about that whole offer from Druce, and feel they need to see if its legit. So Rip heads back into the forest to meet with Druce, and sure enough, it was a trap to kill Rip and his team, and Chronos is there when its sprung. But Rip did think ahead, and brought Firestorm and Heatwave just in case. Druce escapes, but Jax goes against Stein and starts going on the offensive when he shouldn’t, because both men are separated when they blow up a grenade that knocks out Chronos as well. And now, Jax is wounded.

“I REALLY DIDN’T THINK THIS THROUGHHHHHH!”

Meltdown. Ray and Cold get back to the Waverider just as Rip and company are bringing wounded Jax in. Stein starts complaining to Jax that his impulsiveness led to this mess, and Jax is pissed that he got forced to go on this trip, and leave the people he cared about behind. Well, Stein pretty much gives him some tough love by telling him that he had no future in being an auto mechanic, and to grow up. Ow. After Jax is taken away to stew on that (and also fix that wound in his chest, because that’s still a problem), Stein feels bad about that and tells Ray he did that because he doesn’t want that impulsiveness to kill Jax, and that he doesn’t want to have another partner to him die, like Ronnie Raymond did. Okay, but still, harsh.

Kendra talks to Rip about what happened with Sara, and he admits that pairing them up to train was as much to help Kendra as much as it was to get Sara’s bloodlust under control. So Kendra pushes for another sparring match with Sara, and we’ll see where that goes. But the big thing is they have access to Valentina’s workplace, Luskavic Labs, and Stein offers to go in to investigate. Would anyone like to guess how wrong that goes?

Project Svarog. Stein arrives at Luskavic Labs, and immediately figures out what Project Svarog is. Vandal Savage is trying to create a Firestorm of his own for the Russians, and there is a stable core working! Stein thinks he can absorb the core’s power, rendering it inert, but needs the power channeled to it to be lowered. Good that Ray and Cold are there to do it, but Ray spots Valentina heading towards the core chamber, and convinces a reluctant Cold to make her leave in case things go wrong shutting the core down. In another twist you probably saw coming, Valentina is a very willing accomplice to Savage and takes Cold at gunpoint, threatening to kill him if Ray doesn’t restore power to the core. Despite Cold telling him she’ll kill him either way it goes, Ray does it, and Stein decides to try and absorb the core power anyway. He succeeds, but is left too exhausted to escape the guards in the facility.

Heatwave shows up to get Cold clear, but ends up getting swamped the soldiers inside the facility. Cold doesn’t want to leave his partner, but his priority is getting the core out, so he does just that. And Ray also gets captured, so this operation just went all kinds of bad. It also isn’t good that Cold accidentally mentioned Stein created the Firestorm core, so Valentina thinks she’s got something better from all of this.

“Hang on! I’m going slow-mo!”

Prisoners. Later at the Waverider, Cold confronts Rip about leaving the three guys behind, but Rip knows he would have done the same thing in his place. True, Cold says, but he wouldn’t abandon them to be prisoners. Rip assures them he’s not going to abandon them, and then Kendra and Sara have to ask why they weren’t sent in as backup, which…Rip, you want to field this one? No? Okay.

Rip knows Valentina and Savage will try to get the Firestorm secrets from Stein, using Ray and Heatwave as leverage against him. He might be to hold out, but as Rip has discovered, the trio are in the most secure Russian gulag in existence. Will they get Stein out? Will Ray and Heatwave go all “Rocky IV” on their captors? Can Rip actually have a plan of his go right for once? Come back next week, same time, same channel!

–Comic book connections: Not any major ones, except Firestorm was a character whose origins in the DCU was in the 80’s. Of course, Jax was never part of Firestorm until the character got revamped in the 2000’s.

–Surprising that for an 80’s centric episode, no 80’s tunes. Okay. I’m just saying, this tune would be appropriate for this episode and series: