Legends of Tomorrow Recap 601: Close Encounters of the Gay Kind – Autostraddle

Hello and welcome back to Legends of Tomorrow recaps! Today we will be covering episode 601, Ground Control to Sara Lance. Before we get into it though, a quick disclaimer…

In November, around the time of the election, Caity Lotz made comments in tweets (and doubled down on them in her replies/kept them up) about how you shouldn’t hate people for hating you and more tone policing privileged hippie nonsense about how love will cure racism/homophobia/etc. It was harmful and upsetting, especially WHEN she was tweeting these things, especially with her huge platform, especially as someone who is a prominent figure in the LGBTQ+ nerd community, even if she’s not part of it herself. And I can’t speak for everyone, but going into this season, it feels a little like someone poured slightly expired milk all over a bowl of my favorite cereal.

Like, I’m going to eat it, because it’s delicious and I don’t want to waste it, and the milk wasn’t TOTALLY spoiled, but every delicious bite leaves a bit of a yucky aftertaste. Unless she does something new worth discussing (which someone will have to bring to my attention because I unfollowed her on social media) I don’t plan on bringing this up again, but I just wanted to address it, both to let you know where I stand on the matter (you don’t owe any oppressive majority anything; not your time, not your kindness, and certainly not your respect) and in case my feelings about Caity bleed onto my feelings about Sara. I’m going to try to keep them separate because the writers have been so good to us and Sara Lance has always been a great character, but I’m only human. Plus, there are SO many other wonderful people involved in this show, and I don’t want one misguided person to steal our joy.

So, without further ado, let’s get into it, shall we?

Previously on Legends of Tomorrow, Original Zari got locked in the totem, Charlie decided to live a Legend-less life, Astra joined the land of the (mortal) living, and Sara Lance got abducted by aliens.

Mick returns to the Waverider, presumably the morning after we just left them, and finds it trashed by what looks like one hell of a punk party. (My favorite piece of graffiti just said GO FATE YOURSELF.) Mick picks his way through the mess and eventually finds a very hungover Ava using the Waverider’s only toilet as a pillow.

Live footage of me re-emerging into society now that I’m vaccinated.

Ava doesn’t get how Mick is standing up right now, and he tells her that he left the party early to get his daughter to bed. Ava realizes then that normally Sara would have made sure she ended up in bed and not on the floor so she sets off to find her gal. Ava knows where to look next like the back of her hand…no wait, sorry, she knows where to look because it’s WRITTEN on her hand. So off they head to the hotel where the supposed after after party was going to be.

Unfortunately, Ava didn’t have said hand over her eyes when she entered the hotel room in question, so she got an eyeful of the very confusing Zari/Constantine situation happening. She immediately starts throwing up, which is hilarious, and the duo doesn’t know where Sara is, but they also have a clue. This clue doesn’t lead them to Sara either, but their tumbleweed catches more Legends as it goes, this time catching Astra before she gets herself in trouble for absolutely cleaning up at a casino. Next they find Behrad, who is having a one-sided conversation with a member of the Queen’s Guard.

One last moment of appreciation for everyone’s punk looks.

Behrad leads them to Nate, who is talking to David Bowie, but Ava doesn’t care who this glam rocker is because he’s not Sara. Though as they start to walk away, Bowie starts singing a song about Sara, so Ava takes his Super 8 film and his memories and they continue their quest for their captain.

Back on the Waverider, the team watches Bowie’s video of meeting Sara, and Ava can’t help but smile when she sees how thrilled Sara was when she saw the Starman and they find out that Sara had planned on proposing to Ava that night. She had a ring and everything.

Happy Ava = Happy Me

The video ends with Sara being abducted by aliens, which sends Ava into a bit of a spiral, and she spins right out of the room while the Legends do their best to debrief without her.

When Sara wakes up, she’s in a too-small space, in an unfamiliar place, but she manages to escape the pod before it makes her a Lancicle.

You’d think they would have turned on the cryo freeze while she was unconscious but that’s just me.

But when she looks around the ship and sees Earth outside the window instead of the Time Stream, she knows she’s not on the Waverider anymore.

In Sara’s absence, Ava takes on her role as interim captain, and hands everyone Save Sara binders, and holds firmy to her clipboard. One by one she gives an order that is promptly defied, and one by one she checks off a list of the things she knew her team would do no matter what she said. She knows her team, and she knows her team works, so she lets them do what they need to do. Ava trusts the process.

Ava also believes in calling for help, and she knows just who to call to deal with aliens: the DEO. Nate asks her if it will be weird to talk to Alex Danvers, and I scream I DON’T CARE I WANT IT ANYWAY, and Ava says no because they weren’t together at the time so it’s not like she cheated, and Ava knows damn well that Sara slept her way across time and space before they started dating. “Sara doesn’t like to be alone.” Ava understands Sara in a way few before her have. (And Ava has likely seen Alex Danvers and thus is not surprised.)

“I would sleep with Alex too if we were both single at a wedding, what’s your point?”

Meanwhile, elsewhere in space, another cryo-pod opens and Sara Lance finds herself face to face with Spartacus. (Oh how I missed the wacky sentences this show makes me write.)

“I hear you have a friend named Mira who looks a lot like my ex-girlfriend.”

In his magic mansion, Constantine has been trying to use his psychic connection to Sara (that is either real or imagined, it’s unclear) to find her, but when that doesn’t work, Zari turns to Astra; surely she knows someone who could help. Astra isn’t sure how she can be of any use in her newly human form, but Zari knows the value of a solid social network.

I will forever miss OG Zari but Zari 2.0 has 200% won me over. It’s like if Alexis Rose was an actual genius.

When Ava calls the DEO, she learns a few things all at once. A) Landlines are very durable. B) National City has been slacking on rubble cleanup in Supergirl’s absence, and C) next time she should just get Alex’s number so she can go right to the source.

“You know, maybe I SHOULD start that CWDCTVLGBTQ club. We can meet in Gotham at The Hold Up.

Ava is starting to freak out a little because that was her Plan A and as a Type A she was really counting on her Plan A, but Nate tells her that they were already on Plan B the moment Sara went missing, so Ava has to start thinking like the Captain of the Legends, not like the director of the Time Bureau.

And Ava has already set herself up for success on that front by letting the Legends be themselves, and she’s immediately rewarded when Behrad comes back from a smoke break with a tabloid article about a girl named Esperanza who got abducted by aliens when she was younger and has been able to communicate with them ever since.

Ava thinks this might be a dead end but is willing to try anything to get Sara back, so she sends Behrad and Mick to find the grown-up version of this girl and talk her into helping them.

On the mystery ship, Sara is following Spartacus, who is very much not listening to her, including about how maybe they should check the contents of the mechanical sarcophagi before opening them. But of course he does what he wants anyway, and sure enough, instead of letting out another conventionally attractive fighter, this pod releases a very large and pretty angry looking alien.

Toxic masculinity ruins the party again.

Sara immediately goes into fight mode while Spartacus just…watches. Literally doesn’t even flex a pec to help her, even though this is all his fault. Sara can handle it on her own, of course, but it’s the principle of the thing!

She asks him what the hell he was doing and he said he was strategizing; watching and waiting to see how things played out, and if the alien killed Sara, he would have avenged her death. In a very hilarious DC-vs-Marvel dig, Sara says, “Being an avenger is stupid.”

“The Preventers” sounds like a parody superhero movie and I’m kind of into it.

She says that she prefers to prevent death altogether (and also defy it, but that’s just a Sara thing) and tells him to join the Preventers with her. Annoyed, Sara leads the way this time, and he wisely follows.

Behrad and Mick follow their information to the middle-of-nowhere, in a pretty classic looking conspiracy theorist bunker. Behrad just wants to ring the doorbell and politely ask for Ms. Cruz’s help, but Mick is as impatient as ever and shoots his way in. Esperanza sees this happening on her security cameras though, and she and her knife get ready to greet the intruders.

Sara and Spartacus make their way through the unfamiliar halls and end up finding the aliens in the control room of the ship. Once again, Sara tries to tell Spartacus how to best approach the situation, but despite watching her single-handedly take down the alien he let loose, he decides his manly man brain knows best, and charges the aliens, getting fully consumed faster than you can say, “Feed me, Seymour.”

I’m going to miss this choker when it’s gone.

The two aliens look like they have a bit of a fight, and one of them heads back in the direction of the pods, so Sara slinks after it. When the alien notices that there’s a second open pod, it seems to become distressed, and then when it turns around, finds itself face to face with the business end of Sara’s stick.

I love an improvised weapon.

Sara demands to know why she was taken onto this ship.

Taking Zari’s sage advice, Astra has gone through her metal rolodex and remembered that there was a man in hell named Aleister Crowley who used to talk of alien encounters in his Book of the Law. Constantine says that he summoned that man and trapped him on Earth (fun fact: this is a real man and a real book and also it makes sense that Constantine was the one to summon him since, like Constantine, Aleister was bisexual) but worry not, Constantine has the book right here in the manor. When Constantine notices the book isn’t where it belongs, he yells Gary’s name and storms up to his apprentice’s room. Unfortunately when he gets there, it’s not only the book he finds, but also a cocoon. Perhaps more upsettingly…an empty cocoon.

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