DC’s Legends of Tomorrow Review: Tender is the Nate (Season 4 Episode 6)
Legends of Tomorrow Season 4 Episode 6, “Tender is the Nate,” goes on a minotaur hunt with Hemingway.
By all accounts, “Tender is the Nate” would qualify as one of the tamer episodes of Legends of Tomorrow.
Even with that in mind, it manages to be weirder than the vast majority of the television landscape. Sure, this isn’t Voltron Beebo or anything like that, but this is still an episode that features combating the Monster-of-the-Week with a serenade.
There’s a kind of charm that “Tender is the Nate” has. Where the two main plots are the basic trappings that we’ve all seen elsewhere: Taking your boss with you to prove your worth to him; and enemies trapped in a room together forced to make nice with each other, it manages to find its own twist.
It takes these tried-and-true tropes that we have seen over and over and tries out its own version of it. This is essentially Legends of Tomorrow trying its very hardest to be normal and still managing to be spectacularly offbeat.
It’s as if the series told itself it can behave normally and quickly realized that, no, it can’t.
It’s like being the black sheep of the family at Thanksgiving and you tell yourself to act normally, but the next thing you know you’re on a spiel about whatever goofy thing has popped into your head (not that any of us have ever done that).
That being said, “Tender is the Nate” doesn’t really do these things all that perfectly. It highlights what the show still suffers from the most, which is an overextension of the plot and cast. The episode has too many of these balls in the air juggling them impressively enough.
It wants to be able to do this silly romp in Paris and also bring back Nate and his dad Hank onto the Waverider while also bringing along the baggage of Charlie’s appearance, not to mention the side plot with Ava, Nora, and Mona.
That was a busy sentence, right? That’s the point. There’s far too much going on.
As fun as it is to see the hi-jinx that Ava gets dragged into at the Time Bureau, it wouldn’t hurt to not have that be so much a factor every now and then. Ava’s exasperation is, of course, entertaining to watch, but it’s not always needed.
This is similar to Game of Thrones, where the show doesn’t want you to forget that certain characters exist so they keep getting inserted into episodes. Instead, it would be much better to just set them aside until it makes sense to bring them back again.
Legends of Tomorrow never wants you to forget about Nate or Ava and, as a result, sometimes leads to an episode that is clunkier than it needs to be.
Again, though, “Tender is the Nate” is still a tremendously enjoyable episode overall.
Some Stray Thoughts:
- Would very much appreciate a DnD themed episode, thank you very much
- A fun drinking game would be taking a shot every Sara rolls her eyes at Hemingway’s macho act. By “fun,” I, of course, mean you would die.
- Condolences to all that died during the AvaLance Happy Birthday at the beginning of the episode. Where do we send the flowers to?
- “You two are like the two coolest women I’ve ever met and I once met Gillian Anderson at an X-Files meet-and-greet.”
What did you think of this episode of Legends of Tomorrow? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Legends of Tomorrow airs Mondays at 9/8c on The CW.
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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.