Legends of Tomorrow Review: The Satanist’s Apprentice (Season 6 Episode 5)
With a cast as large as Legends of Tomorrow , it’s virtually impossible to check in with each of the characters every episode. As a result, some get short shrift, such as Astra. She’s one who has been largely absent up to this point on the season, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
This series has a really solid grasp on juggling its roster and knowing when to set aside a character or when to bring them back to the forefront. Legends of Tomorrow Season 6 Episode 5, “The Satanist’s Apprentice,” is one such episode.
Astra is a character who, in her utilization on the cast, isn’t dissimilar to Charlie. The show has brought the character into the fold but it has often struggled with knowing what to do with them. It had that problem with Charlie until it had her backstory in place and even then it was a tight fit.
Similarly, Legends of Tomorrow introduced Astra as an antagonist and ever since it backed away from that, it’s had difficulty figuring out exactly how to use her. As a singular presence, her general vibe fits on the show pretty well but it’s always been a question of what her purpose on the show is, particularly outside of her role in Hell.
That is, in its essence, the entire point of this episode. What good is Astra in the real world where she has essentially nothing apart from whatever fleeting support she gets from Constantine and the rest of the Legends. The episode doesn’t necessarily come to any definite conclusion on this and nor should it.
It’s very much a transitionary episode for her character that does the smallest amount of worldbuilding, other than showing us characters who have existed on the periphery of this season so far.
The biggest obstacle that this episode had is for this to feel like an Astra-centric one and not “that animated episode.” It largely succeeds at that to the point that the animation is almost an afterthought, a fun lark that the show embarks on at the end.
That’s not to say that it isn’t an excellent sequence, because it is. It can sometimes be difficult for live-action series to dip suddenly into animation (we’re looking at you, The Blacklist) but “The Satanist’s Apprentice” is successful mainly because it has a really strong touchpoint to draw from.
It’s able to pull from the Disney cartoons, with stylistic inspirations from “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Princess and the Frog,” and use those as effective roadmaps. Astra’s switch into princess-speak is perhaps a bit too jarring but it ends up working as well as it needs to.
With what is especially a side-plot, everything with Sara — minus the Wynonna Earp reference — is just not working or, at the very least, is the part of the season that we’re most uninterested in going back to each episode. Bishop is, at this stage, a thoroughly uncompelling villain and we’d love to get Sara past this particular plotline soon.
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.
One thought on “Legends of Tomorrow Review: The Satanist’s Apprentice (Season 6 Episode 5)”
whoever plays astra is the worst actress in the entire world. The way she pauses and then continues talking in a serious yet weird manner just makes her so unenjoyable to watch. Idk how no one has picked up on her terrible acting skills yet, it seems as if she’s rehearsing her lines in a joke way in the show but no it’s somehow serious
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