LEGENDS OF TOMORROW Season 2×07, “Invasion!” recap

2 Dec

Welcome back! In case you haven’t been following The Flash and Arrow this week, we have reached the end of a massive DCTV crossover as all our heroes face aliens known as the Dominators. Things have been dicey since the new super team has had to contend with mind controlled allies, and some of their non-metahuman players (like most of Team Arrow) being abducted. But as Ollie and company have escaped the clutches of the Dominators with the help of the Waverider, we learn we got bigger problems. Those problems being some Dominator superweapon is almost complete and they are making their way to Earth! For our heroes on this show, one big reveal is thanks to Stein’s talk to his past self, he now has a daughter! Can our heroes stop the aliens? Well, yes, obviously, but let’s see how.

Group Off. Back at the big Superteam hangout hangar, Nate and Team Arrow (well, not Thea, who had enough fun as it is with aliens and spaceships for one crossover) arrive to talk to the rest of the Superteam about what’s going on with the Dominators. Not much is known, so they need some intel on their enemies, but they are lacking on Dominators to capture. But there were Dominators somewhen else on Earth: in their first conflict with humans in 1951 Oregon. Nate agrees to take Cisco, Felicity, Vixen, and Mick back to then to grab one of the Dominators from that battle. Oh, and Ollie wants Supergirl to stay on the sidelines for now, because he’s been having to contend with the idea of multiple universes, virtual reality interrogation AND aliens, and his poor head can’t take it. Boo hoo hoo.

Back at STAR Labs, Stein is figuring out some kind of weapon to use against the Dominators, when Caitlin suggests they need help, mainly Stein’s daughter, Lily. This is of course confusing Stein as he admits to Caitlin later, by admitting he has never met her until this event because she didn’t exist. She’s basically a time aberration, and he’s seriously considering going back in time to correct it, basically erasing her from existence. Yikes, Stein, that’s kind of rough! She seems like a good kind of time aberration.

After this is over, maybe they can put this Hall to good use, like for a Justice related kind of thing.

Oregon, 1951. The Waverider arrives in 1951 Oregon, and after dealing with some first time time-jump illness (thanks for ruining the bridge floor with puke, Felicity!) our tech duo gets benched to the ship while our heroic trio go off to the battle scene. Cisco is still grumpy about Barry’s Flashpoint timedickery killing his brother, and Felicity is not doing well convincing him it was all an unintended mistake. Meanwhile, after the big Dominator vs. Human fight is over and they are collecting dead soldiers to transport back to their ship, our team finds a straggler Dominator and knock it out. Just as they do, a creepy glasses wearing guy in a suit (who looks kind of like that older guy we saw in the present day in The Flash part of this crossover) with some other suit-wearing creeps appear, wanting to know what’s going on here. So he puts tranquilizer darts in our heroes, and once our tech duo on the Waverider finds out what’s happened, they realize they have to save them. Good thing there’s an arsenal of future weaponry on board!

Back in the present, Ollie, Barry, Ray, and Sara are meeting at a hangar not related to the one they have been working out of to meet the new President, probably about how the last one got vaporized by the Dominators. Only a fleet of cars surround them, along with heavily armed men…and some old guy with glasses who looks like the guy who’s holding our heroes in 1951! Instead of being taken prisoner, our heroes subdue Glasses’ men, and start asking questions. Well, a truce was negotiated by him and the Dominators back in 1951, which stayed up until the Dominators discovered Barry’s whole Flashpoint fiasco and called it off. But they will stop their invasion…if Barry turns himself over to the Dominators!

Tech Support. In 1951, our heroes are still recovering from being knocked out in some holding area with the Dominator chained up. They decide to ask it some questions and find they are really concerned about the rise in metahumans (in this era’s case, the JSA) and whether they are a threat to them. Cisco and Felicity bust into the holding area and spring our heroes, they in turn break the Dominator out to keep it from being turned into an alien autopsy, and hey, maybe that will smooth over things with the aliens, right? The Dominator takes off in a ship, minus a transceiver Cisco took from it, and the team heads back to 2016.

When they get back to the present day, they get a call on that transceiver from that Dominator they saved. It offers to spare the crew, but only if they turn over Barry, or they’ll release a weapon that will kill any metahuman on Earth. Back at STAR Labs, Stein is having trouble working with his daughter, and its clear she’s trying to win his affection. In order to focus her back on things, Stein tries to offer an explanation to what’s happening, but instead they figure out a solution to their Dominator weapon. What nice father-daughter bonding!

Damn, Geek Squad is upping their game for 2017.

The Threat Above. Our heroes reassemble at the hangar to get the news about Barry, and even worse news: Dominator ships are popping up across the globe, and in Central City! So Cisco and Nate decide to contact the Dominators to negotiate, and they use the transmitter to Vibe into the Dominator mothership. They talk to the Dominator they saved, and learn that in saving its life, they only made the situation worse by finding that in sending one of their own back with such a dark view of humanity, they might just wipe out every metahuman anyway, just to protect themselves from future problems. So Cisco learns that time travel really does have unintended consequences. An apology to Barry seems to be in order.

Barry’s ready to give himself over to the Dominators, but the rest of the Superteam is absolutely not cool with that. And Stein now has the Dominator weapon ready, a mass produced nanoweapon that can cause agony to Dominators, but has to be put on all of them to be truly effective. That still means our Superteam have to hold off the Dominators, even as a giant metahuman killing bomb is being dropped from their mothership into Central City! Time for some fighting!

Versus The Flying Saucers. While Sara and Cisco take the Waverider to grab the bomb with a tractor beam, our heroes fight a group of Dominators in Central City. Ollie gets rescued by Supergirl, and Firestorm is called up to grab the bomb and transmute it. As Flash and Supergirl superspeed around the globe and place the nanoweapons on the Dominators, Firestorm arrives at the bomb and tries to transmute it into something harmless. After a lot of effort, Firestorm turns the bomb into harmless water, and the nanoweapons are switched on. The Dominators suffer extreme pain, and start fleeing the planet. Yay! Alien invasion averted!

Heroes All. Back at the hangar, the new President gives a rather secret congratulations ceremony to our Superteam. And afterwards, our Superteam kicks back and relaxes after a job well-done. Ollie apologizes to Kara for keeping her at a distance, and they both realize what good they do for their prospective universes. Kara even does a solid by getting that Glasses guy shipped off to Antarctica! Meanwhile, Jax asks Stein about Lily, and Stein wants him to stay quiet to the Legends about this, because he doesn’t want to lose his daughter. Sweet.

Awwww, Kara is so cute when she’s being wicked.

Our heroes start going their separate ways, with Kara getting a cool universe hopping communicator/teleporter to take her home from Cisco, Sara and the Legends taking off in the Waverider, leaving Ollie and Barry alone, to go grab a few drinks and reflect on things. Both of them have seen a past without them being heroes, and find while it was normal, it felt empty.

Barry: “To things not being normal.”

Ollie: “To life being full.”

And that’s a wrap on the big crossover!

–Comic book connections: So while the Dominators were fearsome adversaries in the present of the DCU, at one point in the deep future, they took over the Earth, only to be defeated by the Legion of Super-Heroes.

–It looks like Cisco and Diggle are starting to forgive Barry for all his time-travel mishaps. About time (not a pun).

–Love that Felicity blurts out a line from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok” in her time travel hangover.

–Mick tells “Skirt” to call him. Yeah, don’t be hanging on the telephone for that call, Mick.

–Nate has a new costume, which, eh, could use a little refining.

–That Ollie and Sara reflect on the fateful trip on the Queen’s Gambit that started all of this was a fun reminder of how far this whole universe of shows has come over the last five years.

–“There she goes, off into her spaceship time-traveling like its all normal.”

–“You’re gonna use ‘Princess Bride’ on me?”

–“You look like a Star-Spangled Idiot.”

–“That was pretty inspiring, up to the point Mick compared us to a bunch of criminals.”

–“Great. Saved by geeks.”

–So that’s the end of a great crossover in television history, IMHO. Although the Supergirl portion of it makes this technically a three and a tenth night event, this was a lot of fun to watch. Here’s hoping for a bigger and better one next season.