DC’s Legends of Tomorrow Review: Miss Me, Kiss Me, Love Me (Season 5 Episode 3)
Legends of Tomorrow takes a page straight out of a 1940’s noir gangster mystery on Legends of Tomorrow Season 5 Episode 3, “Miss Me, Kiss Me, Love Me.”
Now two episodes into its season-long arc, and it’s more or less clear that the show is still trying to figure out how to successfully execute its concept. It feels a bit like the season is making allowances for its larger idea of Encores, the notorious bad guys coming back to life in their own time, and doesn’t know quite what to do with that yet.
It’s almost as if you can tell there was a discussion of, no, the Legends can’t just outright assassinate the Encores — mainly because that’s one of the few things they would be able to do really well and quickly — but also that they’re realizing the low mileage you can get out of something like that once it’s in action.
That being said, “Miss Me, Kiss Me, Love Me,” does its best to offset that by fully immersing itself into its genre and becoming a pulpy noir with femme fatales and private investigators. That element of the episode works rather well and demonstrates that the rest of the season will be just as successful if it surrounds the Encores with a backdrop just as distinctive.
The choice to center the episode around Constantine is a simple yet obvious one that pays excellent dividends. He’s essentially already a supernatural private investigator; add the trench coat to that with an astonishingly bad American accent and it all fits just a bit too well.
That’s also a good way of describing the noir elements throughout this episode. It’s so perfect that you almost expect it to not work at all. For example, Ava getting monumentally drunk and doing her version of an impromptu lounge serenade is something that is so ridiculous that it shouldn’t have a chance of being pulled off.
That is the area where Legends of Tomorrow shines, though. It is the show that asks itself what are the myriad of insane things that it could do during an episode and then finds a way to make that the most enjoyable thing you’ve watched.
“Miss Me, Kiss Me, Love Me” is rather tame in terms of some of the more outlandish things the show has done, but there’s still a certain degree of nonsense to it all that has you thinking it shouldn’t work. A lot of this is thanks to the lighting during the 1940’s scenes that really has you believing you’ve dropped into a Raymond Chandler novel.
Legends of Tomorrow has a very distinctive visual style, especially when it’s on the Waverider or current day Star City or Central City. Here, it adopts the gloomier look of a noir so effectively that it really evokes that feeling to an extent that the show rarely has with some of the other time periods that have appeared on the show.
One area in particular where the episode really shines can be found in none other than everyone’s favorite uptight former director of the Time Bureau (no, not Rip), Ava Sharpe. Seeing the culmination of her journey on this show from grumpy Time Agent to realizing she’s a clone and then getting to run the Time Bureau and now as a Legend is a really fulfilling one.
It’s fascinating and heartbreaking to watch her struggle here with the new status quo and her place in it and not feel like she has much of a purpose anymore. For years, she was a part of something that made her feel important, and now’s she’s just a member of the team with much less to offer.
On the flip side, where the episode works far less are the scenes with Nate and Behrad going home, mainly because it doesn’t fit very well with the rest of the episode but also in that the new conceptualization of Zari (Tala Ashe) doesn’t work as well as it needs to.
It’s fun to see Ashe get to play this new version of her character in a similar way that Maisie Richardson-Sellers did with Charlie or Tom Cavanagh did with Wells on The Flash, but it’s still at odds with the affection we had with the original version of that character. None of us are really willing to let go of the Zari that got caught in a time loop.
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 Tuesdays 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.