Legends of tomorrow has been plugging along, and we’ve been slowly creeping up to judgment day. We finally get a dire episode in “Progeny.†But, I’m still not entirely sold on Savage as the de facto villain in this universe.
Legends always made it a point to show the fallout of them altering the timelines ever so slightly, but we finally see what massive changes can take place due to their interventions. We meet Mr. Degaton, and more importantly his son Per Degaton. The elder is a board member with Savage as well. The topic at hand is controlling the population, you know, since those talks always go well. The crew needs to somehow alter the fact that Degaton unleashes a plague that kills millions of people. The two leading options are killing Per, or kidnapping him and hoping this changes his and Tor’s outlook. The first one could go disastrously wrong as that could force Tor to shift his opinion and agree with Savage, thus they attempt the second option.
The whole idea of the second option’s success is to force Tor to realize he needs to spend more time actually bringing up his son, and not letting the obviously evil Savage do that for him. But, of course this doesn’t go as planned. Tor is so hardened from Savage’s brainwashing that he actually resents his dad for having a weak back bone when trading Sara for Tor. Gideon even goes to explain that it did quite the reverse of what they had intended. Now, the virus is let out much earlier after Savage convinces Per to kill his father.
I love the fact that things don’t go according to plan perfectly and really cements the fact that time is such a dynamic idea that simply changing one thing can have detrimental unintended effects.
Surprisingly, the other storyline that I thoroughly enjoyed was Ray’s. In this universe, his tech has become the groundwork for a police state. There are atom robots flying around and enforcing whatever law they see fit, which is exactly the opposite of what Ray had ever intended. That, and he learns that it was a Palmer that created and rolled out said technology. He even almost believes that he had a great great great granddaughter, which would mean he got married and had children, but it was actually just his brother.
As much as the relationship melodrama can become grating, it was actually nicely placed here. It further emphasizes the importance that having a legacy is to Ray. Surely he has all the money and technological that he could ever want, but that missing key is a significant other with which he can share his worldly pursuits. Further complicated this is that he has fallen for Kendra who is destined for Carter, but Kendra does say that he is her future and Carter just her past. It will be interesting if he does ever come back how Ray and Kendra will adjust to to the change.
After the Mick bomb in the previous episode, I thought he would have a much bigger role in the episode, but most of it revolved around the crew talking with him individually. As you’d expect, Snart is finally the one that got through to him, sort of. They duke it out and agree that they fight to the death, but Mick refuses to kill him. He may be a loose cannon, but he is certainly loyal. The snafu with the time masters was him grasping at the only available straw. As if fleeing Chronos wasn’t enough, now the time masters are sending Hunters which are completely robotic assassins, and the only way to survive is to run.
As much as I liked the result of Chronos, the scenes with him were pretty forgettable. Hopefully they are able to make the Hunters more effective and more of a threat to the Waverider crew.