Spoilers DC's Legends of Tomorrow - Season 4

These shows do an amazing job of casting kid versions of their main characters. After Supergirl's superb choices for teenaged Kara and Alex in last year's "Midvale," the young actresses playing adolescent Sara and Ava tonight were also excellent -- not only plausibly resembling their adult counterparts physically, but convincingly capturing various nuances of mannerism and delivery as well.

 

I agree that the actress playing Kid Sara did a pretty good job imitating Caity Lotz's speech rhythms and mannerisms. Pretty good likenesses on the junior Sara and Ava too. The Arrowverse casting people are really good at finding convincing younger versions of their leads (see also Supergirl: "Midvale"). Incidentally, the actress playing young Ava previously played Ruby's cyber-bully in a Supergirl episode last year.

Now that we've gotten to see Maisie Richardson-Sellers play Charlie for more than a few moments, I can't help feeling that Anjli Mohindra is a better actress. She put more intensity and expressiveness into the role than MR-S did here.

Apparently there's a sad reason why Nate wasn't in this episode -- Nick Zano's second child was born with serious health issues and it took a lot of work to save her life, so he needed time off to be in the hospital with his family. But it all turned out okay. https://www.instagram.com/p/BqFtcEfhBM8/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_mid=W-oLkwAAAAFHwiKFwqJONsiQgonj

 

I don't know. The situations that the two actresses found themselves in are different. I have to wait and see before I can agree or disagree with you.

I'm glad to hear that his daughter is okay.

 

They should just do a full on "Rascals" episode for a crossover, it has the bonus effect of eliminating the problem of scheduling conflicts.

Oh my, so happy to hear everything went well. It's also good to hear how supportive and caring everyone was behind the scenes. Among all the crap that's going on in the world Legends apparently don't just deliver a fun hour of hope, optimism and camaraderie on our screens every week, they do so off screen as well.


Anyway, another great episode, even when they do simpler and quieter(comparatively ) stuff they still do it really well.

While I absolutely loved that magical sparkly kiss in the end, is there like some network thing where two teen girls can't kiss each other on screen?

 

The stuff at the camp was pretty fun, and the stuff with Ava and Sara was good to. I forgot all about Ava's origins until they brought it up here. I liked the stuff with Sara teaching her about being a kid.
So I guess we know Swamp Thing exists in the Arrowverse, but thanks to DC Universe's Swamp Thing series we'll probably never get to see him.
Charlie and Mick bonding was pretty fun.
The twist of the child killing monster being the young guy rather the old lady was good.

 

Really? I saw it coming a mile away. This is Legends of Tomorrow, after all. They wouldn't go for the obvious, straightforward answer.

 

I don't know. I kind of picked him as the killer almost from the start. I was hoping for a twist on what would have been the twist before people had gotten use to looking for the twist. Like how maybe the old lady and the young guy are both monsters and the old lady is the mom monster and the young guy is the son monster of her.
Still I found the episode to be fun. They should have let the young girls kiss. That desolving into them as adults felt more like network sexism were they are afraid a bunch of angry people will complain about seeing two young girls share a kiss. I was also thinking and even kind of hoping that Ava wouldn't go back to being a adult and she would stay behind and get a chance at a childhood. The twist being is when you come back to 2018 you have Ava now as a adult but a Ava who has been living this new life with new memories and maybe even more happy for basically getting the normal life she never had since she was a clone.

Jason

 

One thing I wish they'd touched on more, though I think it was there implicitly: I realized the reason Sara was so into reliving her childhood was because it was a more innocent time in her life, before Lian Yu and the League of Assassins and all the tragedy and guilt she's lived with as an adult. So of course she'd look back on it fondly.

 

I knew they were doing a kaiju-homage episode, but what a surprise to build it around Ishiro Honda himself! Although they played fast and loose with the chronology and biographical details. Honda was serving on the Chinese front when Hiroshima was bombed. It seemed they put this during the production of Honda's first feature film, The Blue Pearl, but the idea for Godzilla was conceived by producer Tomoyuki Tanaka three years later in 1954, inspired partly by the 1953 Ray Harryhausen film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and partly by a March 1954 incident in which the crew of a Japanese fishing boat was irradiated by American H-bomb testing. Making a monster-movie allegory about that incident let them protest it in a way they couldn't do openly given the political climate of the time.

I love it that they showed the title card in Japanese. The spoken Japanese sounded pretty authentic to me, but it bugged me that Sara kept calling the director "Ishiro" instead of Honda-san. Addressing a non-family member without an honorific is pretty rude.

 

Only Rory would think watching porn is less embarrassing than writing a story.
That guy in Constantine’s head looked awfully like Apocalypse Michael from Supernatural.

 

between Ishiro Honda (although he wasn't at Hirosima or Nagasaki but was a Japanese military officer stationed/captured in China during WWII); and Dark's daughter working at a Renaissance Faire - the Legends production staff have clearly shown they're all major nerds and part of the culture. (And I don't say that as a bad thing either.)

 

I've since learned that Honda did get repatriated through Hiroshima in March 1946, so he did see the aftermath of the bombing and was affected by it. But they still got a lot wrong -- like giving Honda credit not only for Tanaka's inspiration, but for Eiji Tsuburaya's special effects as well. I'm reminded of how Professor Marston and the Wonder Women gave Marston sole credit for the creation of Wonder Woman and thereby denied the contributions of his wife (who suggested making his superhero female) and artist/co-creator H.G. Peter. Not to mention giving him credit for the polygraph, which was actually invented by someone else years earlier and only incorporated a blood pressure gauge of Marston's invention.

I can see the dramatic reasons for consolidating the credit for such creations behind a single chief protagonist, but it does tend to be unfair to the collaborators who get left out. Imagine if someone made a docudrama about Stan Lee and left out Kirby and Ditko.

 

Gene Roddenberry would have approved of Mick's writing...

 

Considering the finale with a humanoid fighting a monster in a miniature city-scape, I'd actually say it would have been better to make the character Eiji Tsuburaya, taking not only the inspiration for Godzilla, but also for Ultraman from it.

But, in any event, it was a very cool homage.

 

I really liked the episode. Not sure if the, Make like a Tree and Leave, "Back to the Future line spoken again by Biff is inspired or just to easy of a joke. Also I really liked him in this ep and I don't want him to turn out to be a bad guy which you are suppose to think at the end with his secret telephone call
. I have never watched anime but I was under the impression that the end fight with 3-boobed action lady from Mick was suppose to be a joke on that. Starts off with a nod to "Godzilla" and then turns to anime. Also am I the only one loving the stuff at the Time Bureau this year. Nate and Ava and Gary and now the new girl are making for a fun second team to the Legends. I don't think I want Nate to go back now and to be honest I could follow a spin-off with the 4 of them. Make Biff a regular as well and maybe a new character or two to expand the cast and I would watch that show.


Jason

 

It was more of a Kaiju/monster fighting nod than anime.

 

No, not really. The Garima character from Mick's novel was established last season in "Here I Go Again," the time loop episode. So her appearance was already established, and was more a riff on pulp adventure tropes going back to Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard.

And there's nothing particularly anime-ish about Garima except maybe her purple skin, though anime characters are more likely to have purple hair than skin. Three-breasted women aren't really much of an anime or manga trope as far as I'm aware, although extremely large-breasted women often are.

 

When Mick's character poped up.. 3 boobs.. Sweet! good job Mick!
Love all the zanyness.. However.. I feel constantine is a bit underused, and kind of not the best for a "Zany funny" series. Watched the Cartoon that just came out of Constantine.. was exellent.

 

By the way, I've been trying to figure out what the putative etymology of the monster's name "Tagumo" could be. It turns out that tako is the Japanese word for octopus, while kumo means spider, so maybe it's a similar portmanteau to Gojira/Godzilla, which is gorira (gorilla) + kujira (whale). The K becoming a G could be a nod to the rival kaiju Gamera, whose name is essentially a portmanteau of kame (turtle) and Gojira. There's precedent for an unvoiced consonant becoming voiced in other Japanese compound words too, e.g. kana vs. hiragana.

 

Spideroctopusnado!

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