‘PROGENY’ PLOT SUMMARY:
The team finds a powerful ally of Vandal Savage’s (Casper Crump) in 2147. However, he’s 14 years old, dividing the team on what to do with him.
Legends of Tomorrow has fuzzy focus. Last week’s “Left Behind” seemed to resolve that issue with clear storylines. “Progeny,” however, is back to working with fuzziness and derivative time travel plot points.
Ray (Brandon Routh) and Kendra (Ciera Renée) have more relationship drama with Kendra feeling like she’s cheating on Carter (Falk Hentschel). But this drama doesn’t mean anything. The story moves forward because the resolution becomes the same as last week; we are going to stay together and work through this because of our love. Then Ray finds out he has a great, great, great, great granddaughter (played by Firefly’s Jewel Staite) who is using his suit tech to create an army of robots that will end up helping Savage’s rise to power. But again the resolution turns this already basic pregnancy scare storyline moot. She is actually his brother’s great, great, great, great granddaughter and so the moral introspection about an ultimate good turning bad is forgotten.
The cancelling out happens to the entire episode. The resolutions keep the status quo. They don’t kill or even keep Per Degaton (Cory Gruter-Andrew), so he kills his father and Savage (Crump) rises to power when the whole point of “Progeny” is to stop that. This feels like a placeholder episode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qdf2kN6s1k
Arthur Darvill, while becoming more believable as Rip Hunter, still has too much softness for some of Hunter’s actions. Darvill isn’t pulling off the razor edge, nothing left to lose hardness that is sometimes asked of Rip Hunter. Though, in his defense, there is not sufficient character groundwork laid for Darvill to make a convincing performance. The brutal murder of his wife and son are not enough to make it seem anywhere near likely that he would kill a child for the greater good.
Even with all these complaints, I still liked watching this episode. It wasn’t a horrible way to spend an hour of my time and Sara (Caity Lotz) is seriously growing on me. I enjoy the dynamic between her, Snart (Wentworth Miller), and Mick (Dominic Purcell). Having Mick be the sounding board for everyone this week is a solid choice. It feels natural and easily leads to the fight between him and Snart (Miller), which of course is amazing.
Legends of Tomorrow still has some things to work out, like focused and consistent storytelling within the episode and week to week, as well as figuring out what type of show it really wants to be. “Progeny” is a near standalone episode with nothing of consequence actually happening. When compared to the whole, it’s not that great. Yet I was still entertained and, unlike other weeks, did not want to rip my eyes out their sockets while watching.
Rating: 5 out of 10
