DC’s Legends of Tomorrow Review: The Eggplant, The Witch, and The Wardrobe (Season 4 Episode 12)
Legends of Tomorrow Season 4 Episode 12, “The Eggplant, The Witch, and The Wardrobe,” checks back in with Ava, who is trapped in her own personal purgatory.
If nothing else, this is an essential episode for pushing the plot forward, but especially with fixing a lot of the damage done to Sara and Ava’s relationship. This show has often played around with the idea that this pair often operate at different levels, but here it is able to flesh that out more fully than before, even if it teeters on being rote at times.
What makes the duo work is also what puts them at odds sometimes: their baggage is extensive.
Ava is a clone with no memory of her childhood; Sara is an assassin whose entire existence is predicated by stepping toe-to-toe with death — and she even lost once. These are two characters haunted by their own mortality and what their pasts indicate about it.
The trials the two experience throughout the episode have about as much subtlety as a sledgehammer to the head, but there’s also a kind of nuance at play. It’s not trying for anything too deep, but it’s still speaking at truths for the characters that feel necessary for their growth, both as individuals and a couple going forward.
The thing that grounds this and feels like a real driving force through this part of the episode is the strength of the performers in Caity Lotz and Jes Macallan. Their chemistry with one another is so strong and electric that simply having a montage of the two building furniture is immensely watchable.
They are all too believable as a couple that has barely been avoiding arguments like these for a while now, and the way in which it comes out during the episode feels completely realistic and lived in.
That right there could be a full episode all on its own, but it’s not.
Legends of Tomorrow understands its own sensibilities well enough to know that it can easily handle a couple more subplots on top of that. There’s an excellent balance there, even if not all of it completely works.
Specifically, the stuff that really does not work in this episode deals with the theme park that Hank was working on before he died. It is profoundly dumb, and the show is a little too easy on that. The series has always been successful at idiocy as a feature, not a bug, but this is not that.
Heyworld, as Hank dubbed it, is a remarkably bad idea — even by Legends of Tomorrow‘s standards — and the series needs to do a better job of acknowledging that.
Constantine and Nora’s side of the episode works much better with the pair working together to take down the demon Neron. In other hands, the magical elements of this episode could be less effective, but their personalities mix rather well together, making a lot of the goofier incantations double-crossing work much better than it has any right to.
Some Stray Thoughts:
- Using an IKEA as purgatory is a genius stroke and anyone who thinks otherwise has never been inside one.
- Charlie asks Zari if she’s straight at one point and that’s actually a good question. Inquiring minds want to know.
- It turns out that people do not like being sent to hell. Noted.
- I missed Ava. That’s all.
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 8/7c 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.