History Notes: Legends of Tomorrow Episode 201, "Out of Time"

The CW superhero show LEGENDS OF TOMORROW started out last season with potential that was, largely, unrealized. The fact that it didn't end its season with an alert from Gideo about time changes being wrought by The Flash (see "Flashpoint") seemed to be an obvious connection that should have been made, but instead we fluttered through time tracking Vandal Savage.

This season started off looking to be a little more of the same. The Time Masters are gone, so Rip Hunter (Arthur Darvill) and his hand-selected crew from 2016 -- Firestorm, comprised of Jefferson Jackson (Franz Drameh) and Martin Stein (Victor Garber); Sara Lance the White Canary (Caity Lotz); Mick Rory (Dominic Purcell) and Ray Palmer (Brandon Routh) -- are still bouncing through history tracking a rogue time traveller who is doing bad things with history, like putting laser guns in the hands of Cardinal Richelieu's men while Sara is busy getting busy with the Queen. But when the crew sets off on its next mission, they are rocked by a shockwave caused by an atomic explosion in New York, 1942 -- 3 years before the first recorded atomic bomb blast.

This just also happens to be the same year the crew was told to avoid by the mysterious Hourman at the end of last season.

In 1942, the team splits, with Mick and Martin going to kidnap Albert Einstein so that the Germans can't get him to help with building their atomic bomb. Ray is following Sara, who has her own agenda -- finding Damien Darhk (Neal McDonough) in this era and killing him so that he can't kill her sister Laurel in 2016. Both missions converge when it turns out that Darhk is the one supplying the Nazis with technology that has nothing to do with Einstein after all.

Most of this is told through a framework technique, when historian Nate Heywood (Nick Zano) bursts into Mayor Queen's office to tell him the Legends are in trouble. He's been tracking their appearances in history, which has been changing in subtle ways. Oh, and just to convince Oliver (Stephen Amell) that he's telling the truth, he drops the secret identity bomb on him about his being the Green Arrow. Together they find the location where a spaceship was rumored to crash in 1942 and find the Waverider, populated only by Mick Rory who has been kept in stasis the last 65 years. (Pretty soon there will be more Mick Rorys than there were DeLorean's in BACK TO THE FUTURE PART II.)

Oliver sends Nate to help Nick hunt down the rest of the Legends, who have been scattered through time due to a failsafe mechanism activated by Rip. Now, this could have been a rather tedious setup for the next several episodes. However, it's resolved in relatively short order thanks to Nate's help, and all the crew is recovered, save one: Rip Hunter. Returning to 1942 to try to put right what went wrong, the viewers are hit with not one, but two bombshells that will bring them back next week for certain. The first is that Darhk is working with a partner who plays an integral part in the last two seasons of THE FLASH, and the second is given away in the title of next week's episode: "The Justice Society of America."