Legends of Tomorrow Review: The Bullet Blondes (Season 7 Episode 1)
For a long while now, each season of Legends of Tomorrow has felt really distinct in terms of the sandbox that it’s playing with. Season four leaned into the mystical elements and let itself be a monster hunt. The third was fixing the time anachronisms. Last season — the sixth — went into aliens and all the tomfoolery that is found there.
With Legends of Tomorrow Season 7 Episode 1, “The Bullet Blondes,” the take is less of a certain style and more like an arc that could play itself out in a few episodes. That undoubtedly makes for fun television but it’s harder to see right off the bat the kind of season that we’re in store for.
It is, in some ways, a soft reboot for the series. That feels weird to say because the previous season operated in much the same manner with its extraterrestrial bent but this is taking it a step further than that. It’s a complete departure from the formula that we’re used to.
The Legends are stuck in the 1920’s and they don’t have the Waverider anymore, meaning that they also don’t have their couriers or flashers that would allow them to easily sweep up their chaos. It’s very similar to an old season of Doctor Who when the Doctor had the TARDIS taken away from him.
This is the show taken everything back down to zero, clearing the slate, and seeing what kind of messes they are able to get into without the things that they’ve come to rely on. As fun as their nonsense has been over the last few seasons, there has been a general sense that the team can break anything and then fix it and it’ll all be fine in the end.
This premiere works to combat that and place restrictions on their havoc. They’re no longer able to just wipe people’s memories whenever it’s convenient. More care is required of them now and that’s how it retains its Legends of Tomorrow feel because it has none of that.
A lot of the entertainment that comes from this show is the tension between them needing not to mess up history too badly and the reality that they are the human equivalents of a wrecking ball. They’ve never known how to do anything small and they’ve always had to figure out on the fly how to make that work for them.
This brings everything back to a tried-and-true dynamic: Ava, insisting that they treat the timeline gingerly, and Sara, physically incapable of doing that. This was a big part of their relationship throughout the third and fourth seasons but it’s, more or less, fallen away the more that Ava has gotten integrated into the team.
This brings us back to that but now with the added benefit of their relationship having so much time put in. They can argue about this now, at the height of their characterization on the show and with each other, and have it mean so much more now. We understand now, arguably in ways we didn’t before, just how important all of this is to Ava.
There’s a tension now that’s never truly existed on the show. They can truly screw up and there will be consequences for that, not just for the timeline but also for the people trying to live in these times, like Spooner’s mom. People’s lives could actually be ruined if things go sideways and that dichotomy is rather delicious
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 Wednesdays at 9/8c 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.