The logic is that Amaya needed to give Mick something as a peace offering to resolve their character conflict, so the ninja outfit he'd already acquired himself wouldn't cut it. Again, much of writing is driven by character, not just plot.
Spoilers DC's Legends of Tomorrow - Season 2
- Thread starter Commander Richard
- Start date
The logic is that Amaya needed to give Mick something as a peace offering to resolve their character conflict, so the ninja outfit he'd already acquired himself wouldn't cut it. Again, much of writing is driven by character, not just plot.
As I said, Mick and Sara were the only two known killers on the team. I'm not sure why Amaya settled on Mick as the one, but maybe Hourman managed to say "he" as well as "time traveler." Or maybe it's because the amulet was stolen, and Mick was a confessed thief.
I think some of this speculation has been really reaching but I don't think Vixen was revealing herself to be a ninja.
She gave him a throwing star, that one of the ninja's he was fighting lost.
Yeah, revealing that she had learned Mick's true character and trusted that he at least wasn't the one who murdered Rex/Hourman. How did you get such a wild interpretation out of the souvenir shuriken Vixeb picked up for Mick? This show may not have the best writers, but given the season's premise of a historian joining the team, I don't see how or why hailing-from-the-Zambesi Vixen would be a ninja.
Grant looks too damn young and modern. This is how you cast Grant:
Last edited:
I wasn't expecting much from a zombie episode, but the parts about Jax and Amaya dealing with slavery were very powerful and moving, probably the best stuff this show has ever done. Nice to see that Supergirl isn't the only DCCW show dealing in social commentary. Although I would've liked to see more about how Amaya's perspective as a native African differs from Jax's as an African-American who has slavery as part of his own heritage. But in a way, as a 21st-century African-American, he's more distant from it than she was as a resident of 1940s America.
Neat touch, too, with Jax pulling a Gabriel Bell, taking the place of a historical figure who got killed prematurely and using his name to preserve history. Although the real Henry Scott lived another 46 years after this and did a number of noteworthy things that I guess are now erased from Earth-1's history.
So Ray Palmer is now Captain Cold II? That's an unexpected development. I guess it makes sense, since you've got a team member lacking a power and a cold gun lacking a wielder, but it's still kinda weird. What's next, Jimmy Olsen as the Guardian? Oh, wait...
Neat touch, too, with Jax pulling a Gabriel Bell, taking the place of a historical figure who got killed prematurely and using his name to preserve history. Although the real Henry Scott lived another 46 years after this and did a number of noteworthy things that I guess are now erased from Earth-1's history.
So Ray Palmer is now Captain Cold II? That's an unexpected development. I guess it makes sense, since you've got a team member lacking a power and a cold gun lacking a wielder, but it's still kinda weird. What's next, Jimmy Olsen as the Guardian? Oh, wait...
I thought that they said, despite her accent, that Vixen was recently arrived from Africa. She is not an American. Regionally growing up in (segments of the continent of) Africa is a different deal from having ancestors who were harvested by slavers and then shipped to America.
Also, if Vixen was 26 in 1939 (close?) then, if she had been American, her grandparents would have likely been slaves or the descendants of slaves, so what was happening in that house to those people would have been more immediately real to Vixen than Jax.
If in the context of this story, Jax was someone elses property, and that plantation owner had beaten and raped him, which seemed to be the plan, then whoever really did own Jax, his master who was a guest at the party, would be really super dooper pissed that his slave was getting fucked up by this entitled asshole.
Also, if Vixen was 26 in 1939 (close?) then, if she had been American, her grandparents would have likely been slaves or the descendants of slaves, so what was happening in that house to those people would have been more immediately real to Vixen than Jax.
If in the context of this story, Jax was someone elses property, and that plantation owner had beaten and raped him, which seemed to be the plan, then whoever really did own Jax, his master who was a guest at the party, would be really super dooper pissed that his slave was getting fucked up by this entitled asshole.
Why couldn't Gideon forge a new document explaining the Confederate troupe movements?
The raw information either generated from historical records, or from scanning the future.
The raw information either generated from historical records, or from scanning the future.
Last edited:
Civil War Z. This one combined a zombie narrative and a slavery one but I'm not sure it worked as well as hoped. There's has been a lot of zombie stuff out there and this one lacked the "bite" to really sell it. It was remarkably lacking in tension even in the scenes with Rory on the Waverider.
Well-intentioned as it was I think the slavery storyline was similar, I don't think this show strengths are such to do that justice. So we get a kind of "afternoon special" take on an issue that probably deserves more, and as such every beat felt a bit perfunctory and undersold. Jax explaining the hope and dignity in their eyes and all that jazz, I think dampens the simple notion that slavery is bad in and of itself and undersells just how devastating it must have been on those people. Do they have to be exemplary people for slavery to be bad? Did everyone survive intact and unbroken? Again, I think it's probably beyond LoT to go beyond that but it just felt weak.
There were some good moments though: Sara and that zombie head were funny, I really liked Sara in the background passing time throwing knives into the post and Mick asking Stein if he was trying to kiss him. Next week in the 80s could be fun if they go whole hog with the era.
I wonder where they're going to go with Ray and the cold gun. That was unexpected. I wonder if they'll set him up with Mick for a while and then have Snart appear (somehow) to reclaim it at which point he'll build another suit or whatever. It seems like he should be The Atom again at some point though it'd be interesting if they didn't.
Well-intentioned as it was I think the slavery storyline was similar, I don't think this show strengths are such to do that justice. So we get a kind of "afternoon special" take on an issue that probably deserves more, and as such every beat felt a bit perfunctory and undersold. Jax explaining the hope and dignity in their eyes and all that jazz, I think dampens the simple notion that slavery is bad in and of itself and undersells just how devastating it must have been on those people. Do they have to be exemplary people for slavery to be bad? Did everyone survive intact and unbroken? Again, I think it's probably beyond LoT to go beyond that but it just felt weak.
There were some good moments though: Sara and that zombie head were funny, I really liked Sara in the background passing time throwing knives into the post and Mick asking Stein if he was trying to kiss him. Next week in the 80s could be fun if they go whole hog with the era.
I wonder where they're going to go with Ray and the cold gun. That was unexpected. I wonder if they'll set him up with Mick for a while and then have Snart appear (somehow) to reclaim it at which point he'll build another suit or whatever. It seems like he should be The Atom again at some point though it'd be interesting if they didn't.
Last edited:
There's no contradiction between devastatingly victimized and holding onto hope and dignity. Those are necessary survival mechanisms for people who endure such things. It's been my experience that it's when people have it easiest that they behave in the least dignified, most hopeless and cynical manner.
This episode reminded me of the Roots remake that The History Channel aired back in May-June. I suspect the writers of the episode (Marc Guggenheim and Ray Utarnachitt) were somewhat inspired by that. Although they did have to tone it down a great deal, only implying or verbally describing acts of violence that were shown outright in the miniseries, like runaways being castrated and having their toes chopped off, or female slaves being routinely raped. If you want a deeper, more unflinching exploration of slavery, you might want to check that out. I think "Abominations" did a good job within the limits of 8 PM CW broadcast standards, and certainly told a more solid story than this show usually has.
I particularly liked the ending, with the reprise of the spiritual in the soundtrack, and the Waverider flying off with the Big Dipper in the background -- the signpost pointing to the North Star, followed by escaped slaves seeking the way north. (There's actually a spiritual about that, "Follow the Drinking Gourd," but I'm not sure if that was the song they were singing.)
Out of toner.
ABC Afterschool Special-ish...I can agree with that. The ugliness, the brutality faced by Africans just came off.... hollow, in this episode. I also disliked the line Jax gave to Stein, ''...honestly, I can't think of a time period we could go to where I wouldn't face some sort of racism''. As devastating as the evil of the African slave trade has been, and the racist attitudes that helped justify and perpetuate it, the entire history of African people on this Earth are most certainly not defined by it. Or should not. The last 500 or so years is but a tiny fraction of thousands of years of human civilization.
I hate how time travel tv shows gloss over that. There are a multitude of places and periods a black time traveler can go to, and not have to trip over the race issue that their non black fellow travelers never have to deal with. Yeah, I know, there's that dreaded word-budget. Conveniently restricting modern Doctor Who to visiting the Victorian era. Rarely beyond that. The only non Europe based story that comes to mind as I'm typing is the first Doctor's ''The Aztecs'', who naturally, didn't have a problem interacing with 4 Caucasian people.
Being a foreigner from a distant land myself, does it matter that the actor who plays Jax was born and raised in England? It's no where near blackface, but it does make me go "hmmmmm".
But that was the point. Jax's line was supposed to be wrong, to show his overconfidence at the beginning of his character arc in the episode. He was initially dismissive of the horrors of the era because he assumed it would be no different from the everyday racism he'd grown up with. But once he was actually subjected to the experience at first hand, he realized that the reality of slavery was far worse than he'd imagined. And so he changed from the guy who was willing to let slaves suffer in the name of preserving history to the guy who said "the hell with history, this has to end."
That's true enough. If they traveled to somewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa's past, obviously, he and Amaya would be better off than the others. Also if they went to Asia or the Americas, they'd all be in the same boat. And even in Europe, before the slave trade took off, Africans were just seen as exotically different, not inferior. Racism was basically invented, or at least amplified into a social norm, by rich plantation owners. The plantation system not only depended on slavery, but subjected slaves to particularly brutal and deadly conditions, and so they only way the one-percenters who ran the system could make their profits was by selling the public on the idea that the slaves were subhuman and degenerate so that it was okay to treat them worse than animals. So if you went back to a time before the trans-Atlantic slave trade began, racism wouldn't be as bad.
Do Andrew Lincoln, Lauren Cohan and Lennie James from The Walking Dead make you go "hmmmm" too?
Similar threads
