Legends of Tomorrow season 6, episode 1 review: Close encounters of the Legends kind

DC’s Legends of Tomorrow season 6 opens up the show’s most ambitious adventure but is it one worth waiting for?

It’s been a long year without DC’s Legends of Tomorrow. The Arrowverse‘s off-the-wall offshoot thrives on its escapist qualities mainly because of its sheer lack of consideration for anything remotely resembling logic. And after the year that we’ve all had, that’s exactly what we could all use a little more of.

One of the few shows to complete its entire run last season (because filming wrapped before the production shutdown), it entertained viewers at a time when the world needed it and now it’s back to do it all again.

Now in its sixth season, Legends of Tomorrow seeks to entertain, baffle or bewilder (or probably all three of them) with aliens – something that, aside from Supergirl, the Arrowverse hasn’t seen since the Invasion! crossover back in 2016. Does it live up to expectations? Here’s everything that went down in “Ground Control to Sara Lance.”

What happened in Legends of Tomorrow season 6, episode 1?

The season premiere wasted little time picking up from where Legends‘ fifth season left off, with the Legends scattered all over the place after a drunken night in London in 1977. After reuniting (and chatting to David Bowie), however, they realize that Sara was abducted by aliens and decide that the best way to track her down is to track down a woman who once encountered aliens herself.

Meanwhile, Sara awakens on an alien spaceship to find that – shocker – she’s in outer space. However, after a short-lived rendezvous with Spartacus, she discovers that Gary is an alien (and has been one all along!). He’s also engaged to his boss – who is also an alien with terrifying teeth in her abdomen – who the pair managed to send into the timestream… along with other aliens.

Yes, welcome back to Legends of Tomorrow!

Once more unto the breach (or the wormhole)

What is there to say about Legends of Tomorrow‘s wacky nature that hasn’t already been said? That’s a question I can’t answer yet because, before the end of the show’s run, there will probably be a lot more written about it. But that’s the funny thing about Legends because you can go into this show expecting the unexpected (and after six seasons you really should) and you can still be surprised by what the writers cook up. That certainly applies with “Ground Control to Sara Lance”.

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The truth is that the Arrowverse doesn’t handle everything correctly, so something ambitious as aliens could come off the wrong way if the special effects weren’t up to scratch or the storyline was too cheesy. And the truth is that Legends of Tomorrow has occasionally suffered from both of those things. But it also walks a line between typical TV humor and outright parody so well that even its occasional shortcomings add to it.

The season 6 premiere, however, avoided any of those shortcomings. In fact, this episode had shades of the Arrowverse’s finest brush with aliens yet – the Invasion! crossover – and that added a great deal to the atmosphere it created. Yes, it made time for those OTT campy moments that Legends does best (Spartacus’s grizzly death was just ridiculous!) but it also had a feeling of dread that the show doesn’t often possess. And given that Legends works best when it mixes the sensational with the serious (seasons 2 and 3 remain its finest offerings), this could be the beginning of a truly great adventure for the veteran series.

Nothing’s gonna stop us now… not even aliens

Sara Lance’s romance with Ava Sharpe has been a focal point of the series since the pair found their way into each other’s orbit in the third season. They are, unquestionably, one of the Arrowverse’s most stable and healthy relationships so they have always functioned well as a unit on-screen. But that didn’t stop the writers of Legends of Tomorrow from taking a risk by promising to change that dynamic moving forward.

The revelation that Sara was going to propose to Ava is a major game-changer, but one that adds another beautiful layer of emotion to an arc that already has plenty of stakes. The thought of Sara and Ava being apart is upsetting but it was always going to drive the narrative forward as fans championed their eventual reunion. Now there is another layer to that as we’re always awaiting the proposal too. And with an emotional hook like that, it doesn’t matter how ridiculous the story around it gets.

The wait may be short or it may be long, but one thing is certain: It will most definitely be worth it to see Avalance reach another level of the happiness they truly deserve.

Legendary Leftovers

• Esperanza “Spooner” Cruz is definitely going to be an interesting addition to the team. The question is: What is forming her connection to the aliens if it isn’t a device implanted by the aliens?
• It was nice to hear and see all of those references to Supergirl through the Alex Danvers and D.E.O. namedrops. Now that Crisis On Infinite Earths has brought the multiverse together, the D.E.O. and the Girl of Steel would have been the right people to call. Unfortunately, Rama Khan had his wicked way with the building and Supergirl is, well, off-world right now.
• It’s clear that John Constantine and Zari Tarazi’s relationship is more than a fling. And, honestly, I can dig it.
• The message that Ava gave Sara was absolutely beautiful and it very nearly had this guy crying – which says a lot considering it came in the same half-hour that a crab-like chest-bursting tentacle-ridden alien gobbled up Spartacus.
• You have to give major credit to the entire production crew, costume designers and special effects team on this one. It’s well-documented that these shows don’t have as a big a budget as they should do, but they really pulled this one off. Not only was the ship really convincing but the creature-feature prosthetics really gave the aliens a vintage sci-fi movie kind of feel.
• Not sure how to feel about Gary being an alien. It definitely gives him purpose (which he has sorely lacked in previous seasons) so I’m willing to go with it and see where it takes him. It’s also just ridiculous enough to be believable.
• The aliens are off in the timeline (because of course they are!) and now we have a season full of time-travelling aliens (because of course we do!). Only on Legends guys!

What did you think of Legends of Tomorrow season 6, episode 1? Let us know in the comments below!