Legends of Tomorrow Review: Swan Thong (Season 5 Episode 15)
It’s up to the team to save the world again on Legends of Tomorrow Season 5 Episode 15, “Swan Thong.”
There’s this Japanese art form called Kintsugi. The idea is that you take a broken piece of pottery and apply liquid gold or silver to the breaks, simultaneously repairing it while it also enhances the beauty through the cracks. The lesson then is simple: Just because something is broken doesn’t mean it can’t be made into something even better than it was before.
That’s the thing that “Swan Thong” really wants to get across, both as a kind of thesis statement for the show and also as a motivation tactic. These are people who mess up a lot and plans often quickly go awry. There’s a kind of perfection to the imperfection that they provide, though.
The way the show resolves things are messy and weird but that’s just the lacquer in the cracks.
That’s all the more true for “Swan Thong” and has some truly insane happenings throughout but it has virtually everything that makes the series so great and beloved. It fully delivers on the insane but it also has the poignant and emotional that we can always count on from Legends of Tomorrow.
Yes, there’s an entire sequence where Sisqo sings “Thong Song” while Encores get beat up by shake weights but it also has such a great sense of when to have the smaller, more intimate moments that make your heart hurt. It’s not as elegant as it has been in the past but is still no less effective.
The first and foremost thing to bring up is Zari 1.0 going back into the totem to save Behrad from dying the same way he had in the original timeline. It’s incredibly gut-wrenching to have to say goodbye to that character — or at least that incarnation of the character — a second time, but the show has also done a good job of making us realize how important that is to her.
Virtually ever since we Zari, her one and true goal has been to find some way to save her brother, which she has already accomplished. It makes good sense for the show to put her on a shelf for a while, even though we do love her, until they can decide what direction to take her next that isn’t Behrad or Nate focused.
Another solid portion of the show is Charlie’s plot, even though it does end up serving as a farewell to her. Charlie is perhaps the character (outside of the Hawks from the first season) that the show has most consistently struggled around what to do with and it doesn’t feel too wrong to let that character go now.
Anything wrong with Charlie as a character has come down to a season problem where she hasn’t had much agency in what’s happening and a lot of her character has been her struggling to catch up with the plot. The course correction that the back half of this episode makes to give her that agency back is really crucial then.
Overall, “Swan Thong” does a lot more right than it does wrong and even if it makes some weird choices along the way, well that’s just how the show being itself and they’d tell you that’s the most essential thing.
What did you think of this episode of Legends of Tomorrow ? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Critic Rating:
User Rating:
Legends of Tomorrow airs Tuesdays at 9/8c on The CW.
Follow us on Twitter and on 
Instagram!
Want more from Tell-Tale TV? Subscribe to our newsletter here!
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.