Thus far, Legends of Tomorrow has done quite the job of delving into the varied personalities of this rag-tag group, and this doesn’t change in “Fail Safe.†Although we get a nice look into (almost) all of the characters, the focus on Mick, Snart and Ray is what makes this episode shine.
Mick and Snart are 100{3a19833c997fa52158a43c449fe089ff048ac0506a335cac10721cfa396ff282} criminals, and they don’t really have any qualms with that fact. They do, however, stick strictly to a code. When Rip tells Sara that the mission’s fail-safe is for her to take out Stein, even Snart abhors this idea. He convinces Sara time and time again that even he wouldn’t do that, honor among thieves and all that. Mick, on the other hand, isn’t keen on helping Ray acclimate to the Koshmar Gulag. Ray being Ray, he’s all happy and chipper and is trying to make friends in one of the most dangerous places on earth. This gets him beaten to a pulp. It’s quite funny that Ray is taken aback when he asks Mick why he didn’t have his back since they are a team. Mick reminds him that they aren’t a team.
Since the Soviets are trying to get information out of Stein, Valentina is smart enough to realize that torturing him will be of little help. So, they opt to string up Mick and Ray to coerce Stein into making him give her the formula to create their very own Firestorm. As Mick is being lashed, Ray speaks up and taunts them until they turn their whips to him. This turns into a key point for Ray. When Snart and Sara break in, Snart’s only goal was to get Mick out. It’s interesting that while only worrying about themselves, they still stick to an honor code that essentially allows them to become some type of heroes, even if it is in some twisted sense. Ray, on the other hand, really sticks to who we’ve known him to become. They really seem to model him as the “Oliver Queen,†on Legends.
As for the meat of the episode, Rip Hunter is still as odd a character as in the last couple episodes. The fail safe plan if they couldn’t rescue Stein was to kill him. I’m well aware that the fate of the world would be drastically different, but he seems more keen to kill Stein than to actually come up with a rescue plan. This fact only becomes more strange when he convinces Sara to pull the trigger when he was just talking about her finding her humanity. Rip does finally get his hands on Savage, but instead of rendering him unconscious or incapacitating him somehow and taking him to the Waverunner so that Kendra can stick the knife in him, he opts to blow him up instead. While there’s no doubt it was certainly much cooler, it really didn’t make much sense for someone with the supposed intelligence of Rip Hunter.
Even though I was a bit down on Rip, I absolutely loved all the story points with Stein and Jefferson. The role reversal was fantastic here when Jefferson came up with the idea to carve into his arm that they were coming. Later on, he manages to get through to Stein in Valentina’s head when she becomes Firestorm, which was great to see. Their relationship has been one of the more interesting parts in the show, and I am glad it is getting some kind of payoff as we delve into this show.
As mentioned earlier, Sara was tasked to kill Stein, but she hesitated proving that she does have some sense of her humanity intact. As much as I love the killing machine after she came back from the Lazarus Pit, it’s nice to see that the character is going to be more dimensional going forward.
