Legends of Tomorrow Review: Bishop’s Gambit (Season 6 Episode 6)
To say that Legends of Tomorrow Season 6 Episode 6, “Bishop’s Gambit,” is a weak episode might be an unfair declaration to make against it, given the multitude of interesting things that happen throughout it but that’s where we are nonetheless. That very thing is also what brings it down.
There’s a lot to latch onto here and the episode is doing so much in terms of plot that it ends up being too much. To steal a line from Lord of the Rings, it’s butter scraped over too much bread.
Between Sara trying to escape from Bishop, Mick and Kayla going to the planet, the team finding alien Amelia Earhart, Spooner maybe turning into an alien, and Constantine keeping his powerless a secret. Oh, and Sara died again. Is it that time of year already?
Legends of Tomorrow has always been able to juggle plotlines fairly seamlessly and bring them together rather well, but all of this feels rather unwieldy. It doesn’t feel like an appropriate amount is given to any one storyline and it ends up being a bit flat. The episode really needed to pare down and be a bit more focused.
It makes sense, to a certain extent, why “Bishop’s Gambit” is so busy because it’s trying to perform a kind of magic trick so we’re all too distracted to see the reveal at the end coming. That part is well done, although it would be interesting to go back into previous episodes and see exactly when it was that Sara killed by Amelia.
Sara’s timeline through this season doesn’t lead us to have a good point where this could have happened, which means that her memory has been tampered with when Bishop put her into a new body. This of course assuming that the body lying on the table is actually her and not a fake made to trick Sara.
This does beg the question of how many more times this show intends to kill Sara because it is a pretty lofty number by now. Pretty soon she’ll have escaped death so many times that we might start thinking she’s part Time Lord.
In other parts of the episode, Constantine’s decision not to tell the rest of the team that he’s lost his powers is a rather infuriating one. This is one of the worst tropes at play here. It would be much easier for the character to just tell everyone and instead it is manufacturing future drama, which is not Legends of Tomorrow ‘s forte.
Spooner potentially turning into an alien is fine but it isn’t given the room to breathe and explore here that it really needs to and becomes just a placeholder plotline for something that they can deal with another time. That doesn’t do any favors for the episode, though.
“Bishop’s Gambit” isn’t a bad episode, by any stretch of the imagination, but it does feel like a bit of a misstep from a show that is normally very thoughtful and precise in its tomfoolery.
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 8/9c 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.