Legends of Tomorrow Review: The Need for Speed (Season 7 Episode 2)
Legends of Tomorrow Season 7 Episode 2, “The Need for Speed,” puts the spotlight onto Nate for a change as the team attempts to do damage control.
Nate is, at this point, the longest running Legend outside of Sara and, arguably Gideon but he’s also one that the show forgets about more often than not. He’s one that’s seen but not really heard and that’s not always a bad thing. Most of the time, he exists to exude a kind of stability on the team or provide historical exposition to get things going.
The show doesn’t really know what to do with him outside and, as a result, he often doesn’t get an arc or a storyline outside of pining for Flannel Zari.
“The Need for Speed” is one of the rare exceptions to this where the show pinpoints a time where Nate is useful and needed and utilizes him expeditiously. We don’t often get to see Nate be the one anymore that bemoans the treatment and effect on history in recent seasons but the return to that feels very appropriate here.
It’s actually a fairly impressive performance from Nick Zano, one that lets you know how serious Nate truly believes all of this to be and the new path that we might find ourselves on. At the same time, it’s dialed back just enough that it doesn’t feel like it’s dipping into melodrama.
One part of the episode doesn’t feel quite bad but certainly not as explored as it should is the impact that Hoover’s death will have on the timeline as a whole. It’s understood that it’s serious but it’s not really clear why, at least fully.
The show wants to get away with just saying that Hoover is a very important guy who was very important to America over the last hundred years but you can definitely feel it hesitating to delve into that to any substantial extent. That part can totally be understood. Trying to dissect Hoover would also mean bringing up the things he did and the legacy he left behind.
To say how Hoover changed the country, you’d have to bring up the FBI, which would lead you to MLK, the cold war, and then that particular snowball would just pick up speed down the hill after that. It’s heavy and possibly too heavy for Legends of Tomorrow to really grapple with.
That points to the ways in which this season might not be able or willing to deal with significant ramifications to his death, hence the robots. If the show doesn’t want to deal with it, they’ve opened the door to not.
One of the more interesting and definitely screwball aspects of the episode is Zari’s side of the episode trying to dissect what’s going on with the destruction and possible culprits behind it. This is just Legends of Tomorrow at its finest where it truly feels like anything could and will be the cause, making that talk so entertaining.
Could it be a resurrected Rip Hunter? Sure, why not — and that’s half the fun with this show.
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.