Legends of Tomorrow Review: The Great British Fake Off (Season 5 Episode 10)
Legends of Tomorrow Season 5 Episode 10, “Great British Fake Off,” puts a pin on the Encores and transitions the season into its final arc with the Loom of Fate.
“The Great British Fake Off” has a kind of inevitability to it. Before Legends of Tomorrow could really dive into the Loom and all of the metaphysical implications that it can truly bring about, it needed to resolve the Encores.
While this does imply that the Encores were little more than a plot device to have wacky, genre-filled episodes because they’re not part of the grand endpoint for this season, they are still something that needs to be addressed. If they don’t play into the rest of the season, then they are a big Chekov’s gun just waiting to go off.
So what better way to go about that then to just unload all of that ammunition at once? It’s as clean and efficient as Legends of Tomorrow is capable of while also delivering a very entertaining sendup of the particular genre that Clue finds itself in: strangers in a boarding house that end up in a murder mystery.
This works well for the show to be able to utilize history figures like Brutus or Bonnie and Clyde, who couldn’t carry an entire episode on their own but rather function nicely as a piece.
Legends of Tomorrow has always excelled at looking at the parts it has at its disposal and finding all of the ways it can make it can succeed with them, and this is no different.
Alternatively, this episode allows the series to introduce the Enchantress, who may turn out to be extremely important for the coming episodes or a complete throwaway mention. It can be difficult to tell with this show sometimes.
Casual viewers might recognize the character from Suicide Squad, although this incarnation seems to be considerably less Hot Topic, to its benefit.
Another interesting thing this episode introduces is the possibility for a potential romance between Constantine and Zari, making their pairing throughout this episode a bit of a proof-of-concept to see if it could theoretically work. This is another thing that the series is often good at it: testing out something to see if it fits.
Often times it does, but other times, like Hawkgirl and Ray’s romance, it really does not at all.
For now, Constantine and Zari seem to have enough working for them as a pair to determine that it does for the most part. It’s an intriguing wrinkle to the ever-changing Zari 1.0 versus new Zari and the intersection of her love interests with both Constantine and Nate.
Normally, love triangles are something we’d shy away from, but this one has enough new dynamics to it that it feels acceptable, at least for the time being.
One more interesting take away for “Great British Fake Off” is the crisis that now surrounds whatever is happening with Sara after her battle with Atropos. By all accounts, it seems like Sara is slightly out of phase with time and that could be a troubling development.
Combine that with Sara’s seeming imperviousness to Atropos’ powers during their fight, it leaves one with a rather unsettling feeling.
There are some potential answers either in the fact that Sara has been traveling through time longer than anyone on the ship, minus Mick, and perhaps that, in conjunction with the Fate’s powers, has given her some time displacement.
Another possibility is that Sara has, more than once, been brought back from the dead, and the Arrowverse at large has never really gone into the implications for what that could have done to her. How susceptible would that make Sara to Atropos and her powers?
Legends of Tomorrow has a lot of interesting balls like these floating in the air as we go into the last five episodes of the season, and it’ll be fun to see how it finds a conclusion.
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.