Legends of Tomorrow Review: Paranoid Android (Season 7 Episode 8)
Legends of Tomorrow Season 7 Episode 8, ” Paranoid Android,” focuses on the season’s antagonists — the evil android Legends.
There’s a lot to like with this episode, largely from it being a bizarro version of the show and there’s an awful lot of mileage that you can get out of that. The hangup for “Paranoid Android” is that the end of the episode leaves it at a place where we are where we could have been all along.
Given that, the question becomes: what is the point of this? If we’re just going to end at a point that we could have started with, why even go through all of the rigamarole? Ultimately, it’s because the show both needed to focus on this evil doppelganger team but also it couldn’t do too much.
This is very much a preamble to a larger showdown between the two teams and the only places it could reasonably go is either them changing their mission statement or keeping the status quo exactly as it is. Instead, the episode found a middle ground where it’s Zari finding fully what they’re meant to be doing and Sara being turned into an assassin again.
That’s truly the point at which the show wants the Dark Legends operating at because now they are a profound threat. Before, they were dangerous, without a doubt, but Sara as the captain is an entirely different force than Sara as an assassin. Prior to this, the Legends just needed to be careful and they might be okay. Now they just need to run.
“Paranoid Android” is a fun lark for the most part but it is rooted in further exploring the characters and contrasting them with these darker versions of them. It’s seen most starkly with Sara, someone who has always had a darkness to her but also kept that in check with her desire to do good.
We see that same struggle here with her in the recognizable form of Captain Lance but also with more of an edge. Even with her more violent tendencies present, she’s still trying to figure out what is the good and right thing.
Similarly, there’s Nate who has gone full Citizen Steel (without the silver effect) and behaves more like Mick Rory than how his original form would. It is a bit of a statement, however, on the way that Nate has been useful on the team over the years. Either by being the historian or someone who’s indestructible.
Astra, Spooner, and Behrad are the ones who feel the most generic because they all have a bloodthirsty attitude that’s just a bit too similar to one another. Zari also is somewhat odd because she seems decidedly like Flannel Zari but Gideon refers to her as Tarazi, which is Zari 2.0’s name.
Ava is somehow the least remarkable of the team because we have seen so many different versions of that character before that it’s not clear if this is an android or another clone.
Regardless, the stakes by the end of the episode definitely feel raised just by us fully understanding the kind of team that’s now after them.
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.