Night of the Awful Slavery/Zombie Episode.....

So, you’ll notice one comic related show I never talk about is Legends of Tomorrow. It’s not because I don’t find time to watch it or because I ration out my television time among select shows. It’s because, last I checked, Legends of Tomorrow was a generally terrible show. Of all the shows that make up CW’s Arrowverse, Legends is the one that most resembles Fox’s approach towards the X-Men movies. Take a few fan favorite characters, some good looking actors, a nerdy premise, shake well and the result is….well...a fucking mess.

For those of you that had the good sense to skip the show up to now, there are people out there fucking up space and time for various and sometimes, undefined reasons. So, the Doctor Rip Hunter went against the wishes of the Time Masters Lords came to the present day to ask Oliver Queen and Barry Allen to vouch for him so he could recruit a team of misfits including Firestorm, Heatwave and Not Quite Tony Stark the Atom. They call themselves the Legends (despite this being among the silliest team names of all time). So, this is the part where I go into a recap of the worst episode of anything I've watched in at least the past two months. There are spoilers, so if you're brave enough to still watch this horseshit after said recap, just know that there are spoilers after the jump.


Amazingly enough, the show has done a decent enough job for atoning for many of the sins it inherited with trying to put these misfit characters together with very little connective tissue. I tried to binge the second season so far and to my surprise, it was actually doing pretty good at not making my liquified brain seep out through my ears. Well, it was at first….until I crossed paths with the most recent episode, “Abominations.”

So, the Legends track a time pirate that crash landed in 1864 Mississippi with a stolen bioweapon (a virus) because even if the future, mankind doesn’t understand the time honored by-laws of Every Science Fiction Movie Ever Created that dictate man made viruses will ALWAYS turn on mankind. Every single time. Anyway, in accordance with the by laws, the virus killed the pirate and infected the Condeferate soldiers that were going to capture him. So, yeah, Conferderate zombies become a thing this week. But we’ll get back to that.

As a refresher course, Firestorm is the combined creation of Dr. Martin Stein, the most culturally clueless physicist there is and Jackson Jefferson, a young black street tough mechanic who confounds Stein with his slang and hip hop references. In other words, Firestorm is the science-y version of Finding Forrester. The only reason that’s important is because you need to understand why Martin Stein (who roofied Jefferson into this adventure in the first place….seriously) has the social subtlety of rotting tree bark.

So, there’s a free black man tasked with going undercover into a plantation that the Legends do NOT manage to save from the Confederate zombies. But they take on his mission of stealing Confederate plans that could pivotal in Ulysses Grant winning the war. Dr. Stein is deadset against Jax going in by himself because he can’t handle himself if some guy with a whip walks up to him and his poor heart couldn’t take it if he saw slavery first hand but an old white guy could take it (I’m told there is nothing from previous episodes to prove that anything I said in that sentence is actually true of these characters) because apparently, Martin Stein’s power is white guilt. So, Jax and Vixen (don’t ask me why Vixen is a 1940s version of herself or why she’s being played by someone different from her counterpart on Arrow) disguise themselves in slave clothes and head out.

There’s a whole other storyline going on where White Canary and New Bland White Guy (whose power is demonstrating a knowledge of 10th grade history) have to help hold the fort with General Grant against the Confederate. I don’t know why we couldn’t have gotten a whole episode centered around the Confederate zombies because that would have been awesome….but I digress.

On the way to the plantation, Jax and Vixen encounter a slave girl caught trying to escape. The two BLACK SUPERHEROES debate whether or not it’s a good idea to intervene. Apparently, Vixen’s plea to save the woman doesn’t count because her solution to everything is “Fuck that, punch him in the dick” even though Jax’s solution to most things is “Fuck that, punch him the dick” on any other day. Since Jax doesn’t have his Firestorm powers and Vixen could easily put him on his ass and save the slave girl on her without any say-so whatsoever from him because she’s grown ass woman, Jax, of course gets the final vote that they have to leave her to get whipped because they might fuck up time and space if they don’t. I’m a little amazed that the CW even let us hear the whip crack on broadcast television.

To recap, two black superheroes (which are basically magical negroes almost by definition) did not rescue a beaten slave because it might alter the timeline in a situation where there’s a time machine parked in the woods for anyone to come across, Confederate zombies are attacking Ulysses Grant and the heroes have demonstrated their powers in public previously but saving a slave girl’s life is out of the question because Wibbley Wobbley Timey Wimey stuff. Because that would be a bridge too far. Sure, why not.

Anyway, just like that, Jax is shackled and thrown in the barn with the other slaves who waste no time pointing out that he’s named after some famous slave owners. He’s in captivity for a solid ten minutes before he loses his shit and just can’t understand how the slaves put up with these deplorable living conditions. And, naturally, they answer him by singing a negro spiritual that eventually gives him the strength to hang on until Vixen gets herself caught to get the slave owners to lead her to Jax so she could mount a rescue.

It’s at this point that we remember from an earlier episode that Vixen in proficient in several forms of hand to hand combat as well as infiltration and other forms of Black Widow which makes us wonder why the FUCK Jax had to go on this mission at all. Then we remember that there’s another superhero on this team that’s been getting by on the power of sophomore history so clearly, the Arrowverse has a very “open enrollment” attitude with fighting evil. So they heroically run through a horde of Confederate zombies overrunning the plantation to get the battle plans. Before they get caught in the act by the slave owner and we have to sit through a psuedo Django speech in Jax’s terrible American accent, the zombies show up and devour the slave owner. This moment….was fucking hilarious. I mean, these zombies ran straight to this poor fucker. They didn’t even try to eat any black people. It’s like they ran right to the douchiest, most horrible white guy they could find like blood in the fucking water. In fact, if you looked close enough, you could probably see one of the zombies licking his fingers because white supremacy tastes just that good. Then, Jax burned the whole plantation down stands outside, proud of himself because he got to see a slavemaster eaten alive and preserved time and space by really doing NOTHING.

I’m not even going to make a joke about that fact that the episode ended with the slaves singing that same negro spiritual from before.

And that, boys and girls, is why white writers should just stay away from primetime slavery altogether. I guess I said all this to say two things..... 1). Legends of Tomorrow is better than it's been previously....but it's still got more issues than Sports Illustrated. 2). Thank you, Black Feminists, for ruining that slave movie nobody will shut the fuck up about so I don't have to feel pressured to watch it. (Really, I never felt pressure to watch it, so....whatever).