Legends of Tomorrow Review: It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Scientist (Season 7 Episode 5)
Legends of Tomorrow Season 7 Episode 5, “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Scientist,” hatches the team’s plans to finally get out of the 1920’s and onto the next chunk of the season.
For the most part, this episode serves as a transitionary point as the show attempts to move on with the larger plot and that makes sense for this particular arc. We’ve gotten a good amount of mileage out of them staying in this decade and the episode does a decent job out of showing that they (mainly Sara and Ava) have stayed out their welcome.
If it weren’t so early in the season, this would make a rather good mid-season finale. Instead, this is only the conclusion to its first act, which bodes well for the plotting of the rest of this season.
There’s a definite sense throughout the episode of the show getting back to business and that’s done in two ways. First, by making this more explicitly having to do with time travel — something the show has only been able to obliquely reference to rather than engage with directly.
The second is adding a new character to their roster, at least for the time being. By this point in previous seasons, a new person would have been added to the cast and so far that has taken the form of corporeal Gideon and the 1920’s itself.
The time they find themselves in has served as much of a singular entity for them to bounce off of as any character could but it — and Gideon, a presence we’re already familiar with — couldn’t make up for the freshness that a new Legend can provide. This is also Legends of Tomorrow doing something that is very in its wheelhouse.
We’ve seen previously with Amaya and Charlie that this show is fond of keeping around actors that they like having around, even if their original character has moved on. It does the same thing with Matt Ryan, who previously played Constantine, by having him play the new character, Gwyn.
It’s exactly as silly as one might imagine and there’s a fun cuteness with the characters pretending like he resembles anyone other than Constantine, which works far better than it has any right to. It’s a fairly seamless integration, given this is one of the things that Legends of Tomorrow is proficient at.
On the other side of things, the return of Flannel Zari is lovely and very welcome. She’s a character that can be inserted back into the cast with practical ease and there’s never any strain to slot her back into the role she’s maintained. While that’s all true, it’s also a testament to the show that we also manage to miss Zari 2.0 at the same time.
The episode also does really well by her relationship with Nate, one that needed some kind of forward motion when you consider how long she has spent inside the totem with no indication of that changing. The show needed them to either break up or take the next step and this is the way for it to make the most sense.
She’s not a captive in the totem. Before, she didn’t have any real choice or agency in staying there. Now, however, she’s able to actively say that she not only wants to remain but that she likes being there with everyone else and she wants Nate to share that with her. It’s a much more powerful statement than if she took the easy way out to live in the mansion.
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.