When viewers last leftLegends of Tomorrow– in November last year – the heroes had only just gotten their freshly made time machine to work, teleporting away as villain-turned-sort-of-hero Bishop (Raffi Barsoumian) took a bullet to the head in allowing them to escape. But rather than seeing where the Legends of Tomorrow next land in their adventures, “Paranoid Android” instead follows the Legends of Tomorrow who heroically stormed the factory and chased away their pesky android doppelgängers messing up the timeline.
Yes, “Paranoid Android” complicates the fairly straightforward reveal from the end of“A Woman’s Place is in the War Effort!”of Evil Gideon creating her own android Legends team through them not realizing they are robots. Instead, they think they are the actual Legends, tasked with tracking down an imposter group who want to destroy history with the never-ending meddling. As the introductory voice-over from robo-Sara (Caity Lotz) and re-styled credits sequence shows, these Legends believe themselves to be the heroes of their own story.
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Not that the show ever tries to convince the audience of this. Unlike our regular heartfelt and happy-go-lucky Legends, these robo-Legends are all clenched jaws and blood-thirsty threats. Behrad (Shayan Sobhian) and Spooner (Lisseth Chavez) particularly competitively posture about their need for vengeance (even if their loved ones aren’t actually dead) or size of their weapons. “Paranoid Android” maintainsLegends of Tomorrow’s zany spirit through thisparody of ruthless vigilantes, and it’s no coincidence the episode features Sara and Nate (Nick Zano) – boasting comically enormous biceps – in theirsuperhero costumesmore than usual. Much like how Evil Gideon is following her “prime directive,” these robo-Legends are secretly under her thrall to “restore destiny” with the unempathetic ruthlessnesscertain typical self-righteous superheroes embody.
Only it becomes clear to robo-Sara how their mission may not be so moral. She wonders why these “evil android Legends” are going out of their way to help random civilians. That, and the miraculous recovery of a gunned-down Astra (Olivia Swann) and Zari (Tala Ashe) through the clinical Ava / Dr Sharpe (Jes Macallan) raises some eyebrows. Their subsequent task of going to the Chernobyl site theLegends visited a few episodes backand “correcting” their anachronistic evacuation warning becomes a darkly comic inversion of a standard world-saving trope; “if we don’t stop this, all these people… they’re gonna live!”
Yet even using the Legends are templates means their reckless independence cannot be controlled. The headstrong Sara is unimpressed by Gideon’s uncompromising orders (repeating “history is like cement” without elaborating on what this actually means) and, aside from the notion of irradiating thousands of people to restore the correct version of history, balks at threatening innocent children to force aSoviet Generalto reverse an evacuation order. It’s only when taken back to Dr Sharpe’s operating room that Sara discovers the terrible truth; thatthey are the robots.
This season Sara has largely taken a backseat for newcomers like Spooner or (human) Gideon (Amy Louise Pemberton) to be developed. But “Paranoid Android” becomes a showcase for Caity Lotz, whose heavily mascaraed crystal-blue eyes widen and fill with doubt as the episode progresses. The other robo-Legends are more comic buffoons than she is, save for Zari, but Lotz groundstheTwilight Zone-esque realization of their true nature with both confusion and heroic resolve. When tasked to take out an escaped Soviet nuclear scientist, Sara fakes her murder and sets her free, staging a coup against Dr. Sharpe and Evil Gideon to take fate back into their own hands.
Unfortunately, her teammates are less concerned about their end goals and more invigorated by the thrills of the missions themselves. Even Zari betrays Sara with Evil Gideon’s promise of an “upgraded brain.” TheTwilight Zoneparallels truly kick in with this dark ending, as Sara is surrounded by her supposed teammates and brainwashed back into being an ice-cold“assassin Sara,”a persona she has spent multiple seasons fighting off. Her destiny has been restored.
In many ways, “Paranoid Android” is an odd episode. It focuses entirely on the “bad guy’s perspective” without a hint towards our actual heroes’ progress or anything to drive forward the season-long arc. All the episode tells us is how these hitherto unseen antagonists thought they were the real deal, with robo-Sara simply learning what we already knew, before having it ripped away from her. In this sense, “Paranoid Android” ends almost exactly back where our expectations started.
Yet even if “Paranoid Android” does little to give viewers what they didn’t already know, it does make this knowledge more deeply felt. It demonstrates the horrific “by any means necessary” logic of Evil Gideon “restoring the timeline” to its original shape, and the stakes of what the real Legends are fighting against. Most importantly, it’s an engaging, fun, scary and tightly plotted TV episode that provides a mini-parable alongside regularLegends of Tomorrowadventures. Now, if and we, we get to see the real flesh-and-blood Legends in next week’s episode, we will know who we were missing all the more.
Legends of Tomorrowairs on Wednesdays on the CW.
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