History Notes: Legends of Tomorrow, Episode 205, "Compromised"

It's back to the 80s for the LEGENDS OF TOMORROW team, replete with more nostalgia than you could stuff into a pair of parachute pants.

We open with our long-lived villain, Damien Darhk (NEAL MCDONOUGH) engaging in a drug deal in exchange for an artifact, an ancient fasces. (No clues were dropped that I could find as to whether this was a DC Comics Easter egg, as the Isis amulet was recently). Darhk is doing Don Johnson better than Don Johnson did, and when the police arrive he's prepared. But then he's rescued by a speeding Eobard Thawne (MATT LETSCHER), whom Darhk has not seen since 1942 when Thawne hired him to nuke New York City. Of course, for the time-traveling Thawne, it was just moments ago. Thawne reveals that he knows Darhk's future, and reveals part of the plan we saw come together in ARROW, and he offers Darhk actual power rather than symbols of it.

Aboard the Waverider, Jefferson Jackson (FRANZ DRAMEH) is debating with the other half of his Firestorm identity, Professor Martin Stein (VICTOR GARBER) about what they could do if they carefully affected the time stream rather than being "time janitors." Elsewhere, Mick Rory (DOMINIC PURCELL) is teaching Ray Palmer (BRANDON ROUTH) how to use the cold gun and "be cool." And in another corner of the ship, Amaya Jiwe (MAISIE RICHARDSON-SELLERS) is watching Nate Heywood (NICK ZANO) fix up a time seismograph so they can detect time anomalies before they actually happen. And just then, they find one -- December 7, 1987 at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It's the day before Reagan and Gorbachev sigh a nuclear treaty.

Amaya's plan is to reach out for help with the current JSA in Washington DC, while the rest of the Legends infiltrate the White House as tourists. The latter make it look explicitly easy to ditch your visitor's badge and blithely walk around the White House, but then, this is the CW universe where the locks on both S.T.A.R. Labs and the top-secret Arrowcave persistently have strangers walking through their front doors, so I guess it's a pervasive security problem. At least they actually find something, as opposed to Amaya and Nate, who find an abandoned warehouse that hides the JSA training facility. When Amaya enters the code on the touch pad (nice looking technology for 1942!), she and Nate find the interior is abandoned...but there's someone lurking in the shadows, watching them.

Martin Stein is reveling in the 80s when he nearly bumps into his younger self (GRAEME MCCOMB). This is a shock to him because he was not at the White House on this day in history, but at a conference across town. This clues him in that something has already changed history, and he doesn't want to bump into his younger self yet again (as he did last season in a trip to the 70s).

Ray and Mick find President Reagan's jellybeans, and Ray's first move at "not following the rules" (as Mick has been urging him to do to be cool) is to steal a handful of them. While he's enjoying this little bit of malfeasance, they see Damien Darhk and an entourage. They let Sara Lance (CAITY LOTZ) know this, and she is triggered, shutting off her comm-link and going after Darhk again, still set on avenging (and preventing) her sister's death.

In the JSA warehouse, as Nate and Amaya go over relics, the room goes dark. The lurker is Obsidian -- Todd Rice (LANCE HENRIKSEN), aged but still kicking -- at least until Nate clocks him right after he asks Amaya, "Why did you abandon us?" This should be a clue to Amaya that she never returns to 1942, although it's time travel and things change, so who knows?

Sara draws a knife for Darhk and is caught by Secret Service. Mick and Ray try to stop her, and draw their heat and cold guns (no idea where they concealed those, let alone how they got them past White House security save for the fact that it's still the CW White House). They end up crossing their streams (Ray apparently never having seen GHOSTBUSTERS), and the result knocks them on their rears. Mick tells himi not crossing the streams was a rule, Ray counters that Mick has urged him to break the rules, and Mick insists that this rule is the only one they don't break. Firestorm ultimately intervenes, transmuting the bullets fired by the Secret Service, and the crew escapes, but not before making the news as a potential terrorist attack on the White House.

Back aboard the Waverider, Stein tries to tell Sara that killing Darhk 30 years before his actual death risks too many changes to the timeline, and that she is to answer to a higher calling. And while he tries to convince her, Obsidian (reviving) reveals what happened to the JSA in 1956 when they were sent on a mission behind the Iron Curtain from which they never returned. Obsidian himself did not go, because he could not be trusted at the time due to politics and something about himself which we learn later in the episode. Vixen leaves him, vowing to fix whatever happened in 1956 -- because she has a time machine. And then she comes to the realization that the time-traveler who killed Rex Tyler in 1942 is now here in 1987.

Tracking Damien Darhk, they find him having a clandestine nighttime meeting in the park with a KGB agent. Mick and Ray are assigned to stake him out, and Mick starts to have...feelings...stir in him about missing the original Captain Cold. He tells Ray to stop trying to be Snart and just be himself again, as the two share their separate existential crises. But this is cut short when Darhk is approached by the younger Martin Stein, who followed him in order to get his help presenting information to the President. The elder Stein says this never happened, and that he's supposed to be at a birthday dinner with his wife. When the younger Stein recognizes the Russian style watch Darhk's companion wears, it's doom for him, and Darhk guts him -- a wound that repeats itself in the older Stein aboard the Waverider. They're both going to need a doctor (who? Nah...), especially the younger Stein who recognizes his older self from ten years prior.

As the time of the treaty signature nears, the team learns that Darhk isn't there to interfere with it -- he's working a side deal with the KGB for yet another artifact. The crew again goes into the White House, infiltrating the State Dinner with help from Todd Rice, doing THE RIGHT STUFF walk to TOP GUN's "Danger Zone." They find Darhk giving the Russian top-of-the-line Department of Defense technology -- a compact disc -- in exchange for yet another antique trinket. As they fight with Darhk, he reveals that they can either fight him or save the people at the dinner, who are unaware he has a bomb planted in the room. Ray and Mick deal with the bomb while Sara gets up close and personal with Darhk. He recognizes her from 1942 and wonders if she's been using a Lazarus Pit. Sara tells him that she's sparing his life to prolong his suffering. "I know how this all ends," she tells him. "Your ark? Your grand vision?" She tells him the entire plotline from ARROW Season 4, and you can see him getting demoralized, before he's suddenly whisked from the room by a streak of lightning. Sara realizes now that the time-traveler they are tracking is a speedster, like the Flash -- only faster. The only consolation is that she managed to pickpocket the artifact off Darhk, but we don't know what it is.

As young Marty is lectured by old Marty to pay more attention to Clarissa than he does to his work, we find Darhk arguing with Thawne about wanting to get his item back. And he wants now to work with Thawne to change his destiny -- yeah, Sara told him way too much. The kicker? Thawne has a time sphere of his own, and now Darhk is a time traveler too!