Legends of Tomorrow Review: A Head of Her Time (Season 5 Episode 5)
Legends of Tomorrow goes to the French Revolution on Season 5 Episode 5, “A Head of Her Time,” to track down Marie Antoinette.
In stark contrast to the previous two episodes, which operated largely as genre riffs, “A Head of Her Time,” takes a more traditional route. Instead, it takes the time period fully as it was and simply exaggerates everything to the utmost degree, in a way that fans will be familiar with.
This episode is precisely what Legends of Tomorrow does so sublimely: be absolutely ridiculous and insane while also living and delivering an emotional throughline that feels authentic and realized. This is the show’s biggest strength, making something ludicrous have an undercurrent of humanity that tightens your heart.
For example, it can have an episode that revolves around a Fairy Godmother during the Salem Witch Trials, but it can take that zany idea and make it about the fear and paranoia that still runs rampant today and affects the lives of its characters.
It’s a wonderful blend of these two disciplines that never feels out of place, and the same is true here.
While, on the surface, this is an episode of an extravagant party thrown by Marie Antoinette — played excellently by series regular Courtney Ford with possibly the worst French accent in the history of ever — and all of the hilarity that follows. At the same time, it’s about identity and self-actualizations.
In what can only be considered a genius move on the show’s part, “A Head of Her Time,” makes the decision to center this main plot around Ava and Zari. This season has wrestled with the idea of how these characters function within the show given the change of their status quos.
Ava isn’t in charge of anything anymore and has had to adjust to functioning within a team as opposed to the one that calls the shots. What does it mean for her as a person not to have this thing that is quite literally, as a clone, ingrained into her entire sense of self?
At the same time, we have seen Zari go from the cynical and snarky tech genius that can hack anything to now being reset, through time shenanigans, as an Instagram influencer that has been thrust to fame from being friends with a dragon as a kid. She’s so far from where she was in the previous seasons, and that’s true for both of them.
How do the two of them fit into the gears of the show when what they are now is significantly different than the versions of their character that we’ve come to recognize and love?
The episode loses Ava a bit in the shuffle of her being in charge of the team for the episode and doesn’t end up landing on anything concrete for her aside from her newfound confidence in leading the Legends, but Zari is where most of the episode really shines.
It is able to get into how her character works now and the kind of usefulness she still has for the show.
“A Head of Her Time” is able to really dig into Zari in a way that the previous episodes this season haven’t been able to by giving her a scenario that she is completely comfortable with: a party. It drops her into this scenario that she can be deservedly confident and sure of herself and come out the other side on top.
What the episode really demonstrates is that the Zari we see now is a carefully curated facsimile of who she truly is. She has allowed everyone to see an element of her that fits into their preconceived notions and capitalizes on that. In this way, she is every bit as savvy as the old Zari, only now she has a different bag of tricks to work with.
It’ll be interesting to see how this gets reflected in the episodes to come as Zari seems to further merge with the old version of herself and the new.
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.