Legends of Tomorrow Review: Ground Control to Sara Lance (Season 6 Episode 1)
The show that is perhaps the dictionary’s definition of chaos is back with Legends of Tomorrow Season 6 Episode 1, “Ground Control to Sara Lance,” and we’re pushing off into strange, new directions. That is an accomplishment in and of itself.
After doing its riff on straight-up time travel, magic, demons, and mythology, the only logical next step for the series was to tackle aliens and that is exactly what it’s done. The main thrust of this premiere — and maybe the first chunk of this season — is that our dear Captain Sara Lance has been abducted by aliens.
That’s a starting point that, just on the face of it, offers up so many rich and promising (and tasty) avenues for the show to explore. Appropriately, this is Legends of Tomorrow at its most Doctor Who and really embracing the absurdity that comes along with that.
Legends of Tomorrow is already a series that has a healthy appreciation and utilization of camp and nonsense and you can really feel that during this episode. At the same time, it knows how to pull back on that just enough to allow the gravity and emotion of the situation to settle in without going into grimdark territories that other Arrowverse shows might.
Splitting the time and anchoring “Ground Control to Sara Lance” between Sara and Ava does this fairly nicely as it allows the episode to jostle from outrageous sci-fi like Spartacus getting eaten by an alien and back to Ava wrestling with the prospect of needing to find Sara.
It’s a testament to the amount of time that the series has put into that relationship that it needs to do so little work in not just understanding Ava’s headspace but also the anguish that we feel, too, at these two being separated. The added detail of Sara’s plans to propose to Ava could come off as manipulative if it were another relationship that we had less investment in.
On the other side of this, we have a reveal of Gary and his backstory as an alien in disguise, which is absolutely a retcon that doesn’t fully work but it’s not hard to see why the writers would include that. The show needs a sympathetic alien face (for lack of a better word) that can explain to everyone else about alien exposition.
The good part about that reveal for his character is that now they’ve boxed themselves into a narrative corner and won’t be able to use Gary a quick shortcut for an episode. Gary is an alien; that’s it. That limits what they can do with him now and that can only be a good thing for a show that sometimes has a Gary problem.
This episode also sets up the season-long clean up effort for the Legends fairly well as Sara accidentally unleashes different aliens into the timeline.
At least for the beginning of the season, Legends of Tomorrow needs that episodic approach that something like this will grant them and it’s done rather well here. Obviously, Kayla — the other alien — will return to exact revenge on Sara but this sets up rather promising things for this season.
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 Sundays at 8/7c 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.