Legends of Tomorrow Review: The Final Frame (Season 6 Episode 11)
Legends of Tomorrow Season 6 Episode 11. “The Final Frame,” traps the team inside of a cosmic bowling alley where they have to save for the survival of the planet.
There’s a lot to this episode that is obvious on the surface of it or predictable but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Legends of Tomorrow has always excelled at taking what should be a bug and making it a feature. It’s tropey but, as with most episodes of this show, it’s the details on this carousel of nonsense that ends up elevating it.
The episode begins from a simple place: Win at a game or the world will be destroyed. The twist on that here is that the Earth has been transformed into an actual bowling ball that is being used in the game by the opponents and that is Grade A tomfoolery.
This episode is one of those where you need to imagine that Legends of Tomorrow is off in its own little world because you definitely think about what Barry Allen or Kara Danvers’s reaction would be to this. That’s neither here nor there, though.
The most important thing about this episode is it’s another case of the show having a truly good sense of fun and knowing how to implement that. Here’s how I heard this described once: imagine fun television like baking a souffle. It’s light and very enjoyable to eat. It’s also incredibly hard to make and even easier to mess up.
This episode is a testament to this show’s ability to do just that and make it look so easy. The fact is it’s not easy to be fun. It takes a lot of skill to manage that tone and sensibility and still have it be good. Legends of Tomorrow has always been very successful at that and this is a showcase of that.
A bit of that credit goes to Jes Macallan, who did the directing for this episode, and is able to inject that nature into the visual language here. You might discount it but there as small flourishes throughout “The FInal Frame” that evoke that sense, from a montage of a wedding dress fitting to simple cuts of bowling.
The bowling side of the episode is counterbalanced nicely by Zari 1.0 (or Flannel Zari, as she will now be known) and Nate down on the surface on the Earth and seeing some of the practical chaos that would come from the planet suddenly be a bowling ball.
It’s less successful at this being an episode about their relationship but it’s not hard to see why this path is being taken. The show finally has this version of the character before it decides she has to go back and they want to take this chance to talk about Nate and hers relationship.
It just feels that, by the end of it, if their status quo is going to be the same as it was prior to this in (as the episode points out) basically in a long-distance relationship), then maybe we could have used Flannel Zari to serve any other function. It only really serves Nate and not so much Zari, which feels like a disservice.
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.