Legends of Tomorrow Review: Romeo V. Juliet: Dawn of Justness (Season 5 Episode 8)
Legends of Tomorrow Season 5 Episode 8, “Romeo V. Juliet: Dawn of Justness,” hangs out with Shakespeare and says goodbye to Ray and Nora.
Closing the book on a character’s journey is a hard thing for any show to deal with, especially if said character is a beloved one like Ray. It doesn’t make it any easier when real-world influences hang over the departure like a dark cloud.
It should be easy to separate the two things — the narrative reasons and the actual ones — but it’s not as easily accomplished here. This isn’t a matter like other shows where the actors wanted to leave and now have to be written out. This is instead fueled by the powers-that-be, and that’s a lot harder to deal with.
Perhaps we should just be thankful that Ray and Nora weren’t killed off to fulfill their exit.
In any case, it’s gut-wrenching to watch these two characters leave but Legends of Tomorrow, as usual, does it as well as you possibly could. Since “Legends of Tomorrow Season 5 Episode 7, “Mr. Parker’s Cul-De-Sac,” so strongly put a focus on Nora as a kind of celebration of her, “Romeo V. Juliet: Dawn of Justness” gets to firmly direct its attention on Ray and give him a send-off worthy of him.
While the rationalization the show comes up with — Ray leaving the Waverider so that he can fully support Nora — feels a bit weak, the episode does a lot to make that work better than it really has any right to. This should feel even more contrived and invented than it does but the show somehow finds the right tone to sell it.
Ray Palmer is a character who is so sincere and earnest that he could tell the audience just about anything regardless of its absurdity, and we’d all nod our heads and say, “yeah, that makes sense.”
A lot of that is due to Brandon Routh’s performance of him, and how strongly he injects that boy scout energy into the character.
Ray is a fantastic character, and he always brought this lively optimism and joy to the show. It was always abundantly clear, from a personality level, the purpose that he served on the Waverider. True, he became the de-facto science character after a certain point, but his peppy attitude is what made him feel essential as a character.
It’s exhaustingly difficult to watch him go, and like Ray putting off telling Nate that he’s leaving, we want the mission to go on forever because then Ray will never have to leave. Granted, that’s helped because the adventure with William Shakespeare and the subsequent “Romeo and Juliet” is very silly and perfectly Legends of Tomorrow.
Like we mentioned before, though, there are far worse ways for a character to go than to be able to ride off into the literal sunset with the love of their lives and presumably live happily ever after. It’s not much but we can take some measure of comfort in that.
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.