Legends of Tomorrow Review: Deus Ex Latrina (Season 7 Episode 6)
Legends of Tomorrow Season 7 Episode 6, “Deus Ex Latrina,” is back to business as usual when they get themselves stuck In Chernobyl just before the meltdown.
After the last few episodes of the series trying out something different yet still decidedly in its wheelhouse, it’s comforting to come back to time travel hijinx that we’re not expected to engage with for longer than a single episode. A certain part of the fun of the show is seeing how much they can mess up a time period before they can fix it and then bounce.
That is the kind of formula that we’re back to now, except — if the pattern holds — the team breaks their new time travel machine and has to find a way to fix it. No longer are they reacting to anachronisms or something to fix in time but they are potentially the ones that can do the breaking.
The other added element here is that they are now actively being followed by the rogue Waverider and any change to the timeline they make can lead to actual consequences for them that aren’t as easy to fix. They’re still without time couriers or flashers so what they do here is still pretty much what they do without any exceptions.
“Deus Ex Latrina” puts a spotlight on the fact that — by way of the perspective on Bishop and Bad Gideon — the Legends have accidentally become the villains of their own story. Traditionally, they are the ones to clean up any anachronism but they are the ones causing them now, albeit with good reasons and intentions.
That fact is even compounded by the way that Behrad, Flannel Zari, and Gwyn ultimately react to begin in Chernobyl and is decidedly a different tactic to time travel than what’s preceded it. The Legends have made plenty of corrections to the timeline but they’ve always been minimal.
The episode draws a line back to Zari changing the timeline to bring Behrad back but that was surgical. She had to wait a long time until a correct opportunity presented itself that allowed her to act without there being much fallback to it, minus her not being able to exist in that reality anymore.
This, however, feels haphazard even for Legends of Tomorrow . Preventing Chernobyl is a sum good on a humanitarian level but, especially now, there’s no way of knowing how that branches out to impact everything at large. It also seems like the simplest solution that, as anyone familiar with the disaster would tell you, definitely is not.
What’s entirely possible is that Legends of Tomorrow is now fully a show devoid of any subtlety, which isn’t to say that it had much to begin or is a bad thing in general. It does, however, feel like a far cry from the show at its most interesting in the third season.
Chernobyl itself, as a framing device and backdrop, also feels slightly cheap because so little of the episode actually revolves around them being there versus their initial presumption that they’re in prehistoric times. There’s not enough there of Chernobyl to really feel meaningful in one way or another.
Please note that we are not talking about Gary and Gideon because it’s weird and makes us uncomfortable, thank you very much.
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 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.