THE FLASH Speeds Toward a Few Legends
Episode 208 “Legends of Today”
[photos: Diyah Pera & Cate Cameron/The CW]
It’s the annual tag team episodes! And this time Team Berlanti is taking the opportunity to use Team Flash and Team Arrow to start assembling Team Legend. Or is it Team Rip? Team Hunter?
This hour: a new menace introduced! A budding romance nipped in the bud? And an angel gets her wings!
Kendra Saunders — lovely, innocent, Kendra — suddenly finds herself the target of a madman’s rage. This man has stowed away on a boat, arriving in Central City to wreak havoc and kill Kendra. And it matters not who stands in his way.
Barry quickly realizes that they’re not dealing with an ordinary metahuman, but something far more … mystical? And for that, he turns to Oliver Queen and the gang in Star City, where magic is just another pill to swallow for our costumed heroes. Taking Kendra to hide out in the Arrowcave — the new digs are most impressive to everyone except Cisco — Ollie and Company start to put the pieces together to find this menace and put a stop to him.
Only he follows them to Star City, attacking the lot in Oliver and Felicity’s apartment. The team barely makes it out, with Thea planting an arrow in Savage’s heart. But Savage disappears over the railing instead of meeting the pavement as street pizza.
Facial recognition matches an image from 1975, and Malcolm Merlyn apparates into the lair to identify their suspect as Vandal Savage, an immortal who’s crossed paths with the League in the past — and he was also advisor to Genghis Khan, among others.
Kendra has the most difficult time taking it all in, of course, but the rest of the team doesn’t process it very well, either. Although Barry seems to be thinking it through pretty quickly — first he’s traveling through time, then fighting a telepathic gorilla — but even he’s trying to wrap his head around it.
Meanwhile, in the Flash plot, Dr. Snow has focused her biochemistry expertise on Harrison Wells’ speed formula, Velocity 6, which is intended to boost Barry’s access to the Speed Force™ and get him up to Zoom’s skill level. Jay is adamantly opposed to using the drug, saying that the Speed Force™ isn’t something you can manipulate through drugs.
Despite Garrick’s refusal to help, Wells goes out for the raw materials for Velocity 6, which is when he’s spotted by Detective Patty Spivot, who doesn’t know Wells is the Earth-2 variety and doesn’t know about the whole parallel universes thing when she follows Wells back to STAR Labs, confronts him, and then shoots him when he appears to pull a gun out.
Snow’s first question: “Didn’t Joe tell you?” kind of shows where we are, really. Everyone knows all the secrets except the one person who kinda probably should know. Last season it was Iris. Looks like this season it’s Patty who’s in the dark.
As is Kendra, who’s trying to figure out why she’d be a target for Savage, when she gets snatched by a winged man — Carter Hall, also known as Prince Khufu back in ancient Egypt, where he and Kendra — Priestess Chay-Ara — were slain by Vandal Savage for the first of 206 times over the past four thousand years.
After capturing Hall, they get the story in detail: Khufu and Chay-Ara were lovers four thousand years ago, and Savage killed them. They’re all drawn together by mystical energies as they keep getting reincarnated into various forms and finding each other in every lifetime. So far, Savage has killed them 206 times, and Hall wants to make sure he can protect Kendra from another attack. To which Cisco says what everyone’s thinking: “You’re 0 for 206 and you still think you’re her best bet?”
Hall thinks Kendra is just taking longer to “emerge” as Chay-Ara, so he suggests what any normal sane person would: go up to the roof and jump. Only it doesn’t quite go the way it should, as Barry has to rescue Kendra before she becomes street pizza.
Hm. Pizza…
Carter thinks Kendra’s holding back, not willing to fully embrace the idea of being a four-thousand-year-old Egyptian priestess. But she needs to do something to “emerge” soon or Savage will win. Again.
They also figure out that Savage is after an ancient artifact known as the Staff of Horus, something he had in his possession when he killed Khufu and Chay-Ara the first time. It’s somehow connected with the three of them, and turns out it’s in Central City. Which is why Kendra was drawn there in the first place.
So Barry and Oliver head to Central City to stop Savage from getting the staff, but they’re too late. After a battle inside the church (Savage obviously never saw Highlander… “Holy ground…”) Savage escapes by blowing up the building.
Meanwhile, Kendra and Cisco have a heart-to-heart that leads to her leaping off the tall building in a single bound, and sprouting wings! And methinks we heard a little of the Legends of Tomorrow theme as Kendra flies around the building. Wait… excuse me, Cisco. “Hawkgirl.”
And at the end, in Central City, after Oliver sees that Jitters has a coffee named after The Flash, he spots Samantha, the girl Moira paid off to run away with Oliver’s love child. They’re reaching far back into the show’s earlier seasons for this one, and it’s a heck of a long play that we’ll see start to play out in part two.
