Legends of Tomorrow Review: Slay Anything (Season 5 Episode 4)
It’s time for a riff on the slasher genre as Legends of Tomorrow Season 5 Episode 4, “Slay Anything,” takes on a serial killer Encore at a high school reunion.
It was already pretty evident with Legends of Tomorrow Season 5 Episode 3, “Miss Me, Kiss Me, Love Me,” but Legends of Tomorrow seems to be using this season-long arc of Encores to tackle a different genre each episode.
It does this in ways that are so sublimely weird and off-kilter, still being the show we recognize, with little flourishes that feel of a piece with what they’re paying homage to.
This enables the show to do what always feels like its ultimate goal: to be as strange as possible in ways that still have a strong emotional undercurrent.
With “Slay Anything,” it’s evoking this sense of a teen slasher horror and a John Hughes film almost simultaneously without harkening back to anything truly specific within those types of films.
You get hints of something like Friday the 13th, Carrie, or, alternatively, Sixteen Candles, which gives you just enough without directly drawing a correlation in the audience’s mind.
Legends of Tomorrow knows well enough to know how much is too much in terms of honoring the genre. It doesn’t need to supplant itself into a story that too strongly resembles something that we’d recognize from a well-known property and instead relies on a more spiritual connection.
It could easily be a prolific horror film now set at a high school reunion — there is a bit of that in certain regards — but “Slay Anything” has loftier goals than something that simple.
One of the things that makes Legends of Tomorrow feel so special, even though Timeless did a very similar thing, is that this is a show, as Ray states at one point, that doesn’t need to pretend to care about the sanctity of time. Different shows might fuss about how things might be altered by messing with history, but this show is so profoundly past that at this point.
This is a show that can tinker and muck around with time, partly because it lives by a standard of why not, but also because it constantly wants to make the most interesting decision that it can. In this case, that involves going back to when the supposed Encore was in high school and preventing him from breaking bad.
This is a fascinating concept for a couple of reasons. It’s rooted in this kindness, that the show has often been so good at demonstrating, where it looks to see if it can find a way to make everyone’s lives better, even the one they think is the killer.
Shown through the prism of Nora’s own dark past, it emphasizes that this is a show that always has an interest in redemption.
You have to overlook, as the show does, that the serial killer as they understand it is just a different type of mass shooter, and the show really does not want to engage with that. It’s really necessary for the audience not to think about that too. It’s too uncomfortable an idea to fix a perpetrator of something like that.
That opens a whole other can of worms that no one needs to be dealing with. If they can stop this killer, what’s to stop them from preventing shooters from incidents like Sandy Hook or Parkland? It’s best not to think about that at all.
“Slay Anything” allows Nora this opportunity to look at her own past and how it applies to Freddy, giving her and the audience this nice parallel to draw from. It’s a little on the nose given her last name, but the idea that Freddy and Nora end up coming away with is that the presence of darkness within you doesn’t necessarily make you dark.
You might have impulses that are bad but only you get to decide what you’re going to do with that.
The decision at the end, to bring it back to its genre roots, of making Freddy’s mom be the one that is the Encore and not him is particularly brilliant.
Like we said earlier, it reminds you of Friday the 13th without having to actually be that too strongly. It’s a simple twist that works far better than it has any right to, which makes it perfect for Legends of Tomorrow.
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.