Meanwhile, Gary made it back onto the Waverider with Gary Jr. 2, and he has to skulk around the ship to stop the Fates from getting the Loom. The gang steals a bus that craps out on the road, and Constantine and Zari make a detour to a junkyard where he has to temporarily kill her to avoid a zombie horde, but they make it and get to the safe house, which is like a bigger Winchester from Shaun of the Dead. Also, Zari and Constantine bone.
The big problem with ongoing superhero storytelling, one that used to be fairly exclusive to comics (since Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne don’t actually have to age when they’re colored dots on a page) is that any real change can be easily undone whenever the creative team decides to.
It’s that old card about the illusion of change – readers don’t really want character growth, they want everything put back where they found it at the end of a story, so the Green Goblin is alive, Alfred’s hand got better, Jean Grey was actually an alien simulacrum, etc. etc. This leeches the importance out of serialized storytelling. If you know that there’s an issue coming out next month with a character in it, and you know that death is a revolving door, it doesn’t really matter if someone bites it, so the death scene doesn’t hit the same.
Same goes for Legends of Tomorrow. We know there’s an episode next week. We’ve all marveled at the shots of Ava and Sara in Star Trek uniforms, imagining what fresh chaos the mad scientists who make this show will throw at us. And we know the macguffin of this season, the Loom of Fate, is going to be used to bring people back from the dead. That’s the whole point of the season.
So when we get a look outside the pub to see London in flames and the city overrun by zombies, the first thought is “that’s a big thing for them to fix.” And when Sara tells Ava at the pub that she saw her own death, there was no reason to doubt that it would happen. But when Atropos killed Astra on the Waverider, that’s when it started to click that the show was going to go a little bigger than they’d telegraphed.