Legends of Tomorrow, Season 1 Episode 8: Night of the Hawk Recap
Don’t need the Legend’s of Tomorrow episode recap for Night of the Hawk? Click here to jump directly to Violet’s thoughts on the episode!
To see Josh’s thoughts on this week’s Legend’s of Tomorrow episode, Night of the Hawk, click here to get directly there!
In Harmony Falls in 1958 some teenagers are drag racing, when one of the cars blows a tire and crashes into something on the side of the road. Vandal Savage comes out of nowhere and tells them it’s a meteorite, and that he was drawn to it.
The Legends arrive in Harmony Falls, where apparently several citizens have been brutally slain or gone missing.
Ray and Kendra pose as husband and wife and buy the house of one of the victims. Meanwhile, Dr. Stein replaces a doctor at the asylum, and Sara joins him as a nurse. Jax poses as the new kid in town and assigned to ask around about the teenagers that went missing. That leaves Rip and Snart to act as FBI agents and investigate at the police station. They convince the sheriff to hand over the case files.
Later, Stein, Sara, and Jax meet up for lunch at a diner, and Stein marvels about the idyllic time era. However, Sara and Jax point out the flaws – sexism and racism. When Stein and Sara return to the asylum, Jax goes and talks to Betty, the girlfriend of one Tommy, one of the teenagers who went missing. Tommy’s friends don’t approve, and it looks like they’re about to get in a fight, but they decide not to for the moment. Betty asks Jax to hang out tomorrow night. Meanwhile, Kendra and Ray enjoy playing house together.
Over at the asylum, Dr. Stein asks Sara to get him the files on violent patients. Sara notices a doctor hitting on one of the nurses, who seems uncomfortable with it, and “accidentally” makes him spill coffee on himself. The nurse gives Sara a tour of the asylum. There’s an off limits wing called Hall H where they house the violent psychotics. Sara notices a picture of Vandal Savage on the wall, with the name Dr. Curtis Knox.
That night Dr. and Mrs. Knox stop by Kendra and Ray’s house to welcome them to the neighborhood. Kendra is surprised to see Vandal Savage. Dr. and Mrs. Knox invite Ray and Kendra to their house part that will take place later that night.
Meanwhile, a man’s car breaks down, and a creature with feathers falls out of the sky and mauls him to death.
Back at the Waverider, Kendra reports that Vandal Savage doesn’t think that she recognizes him yet, so he won’t try to kill her. Rip and Snart haven’t been able to glean anything from the police files. Jax calls Snart out on what he did to Rory, but Snart ignores him. Rip tells Kendra and Ray to keep an eye on Savage at his party, so that Sara and Stein can find out what he’s doing in the secret wing of the asylum.
Sara and the nurse find some booze and drink together. Sara asks if she has a girlfriend, having figured out that she’s not really into guys. At first, she says she doesn’t want to talk about it. However, she admits that she did kiss a girl once. Stein calls Sara away for a word, and accuses her of trying to seduce the nurse, but Sara says she was liberating her. Just then, the alarm goes off and the orderlies rush to Hall H.
At the party, Kendra and Ray split up. Ray searches the back while Kendra stays out front and talks to Savage. Ray finds a room with a padlocked door. Savage gets a phone call, and tells Kendra that one of his patients needs attention.
Savage checks in on his patient, Tommy, the teen who went missing. There’s a dead orderly on the floor, and we see that Tommy and a few others have turned into monsters with wings.
At the Waverider, Ray and Kendra report to Rip their plans to break into Savage’s “man cave.” Jax comes in and tells them he has a date with Tommy’s girlfriend, Betty, and Rip warns him to be careful when they’re out in public.
Ray uses his ATOM suit to get into Savage’s locked room. There, he finds the ancient dagger. Kendra, who is keeping a lookout from across the street, warns Ray that Savage has returned. Ray shrinks and flies out just as Savage returns.
The nurse admits to Sara that Dr. Knox’s restricted wing freaks her out, though she doesn’t know what he’s doing to the patients there. The nurse kisses Sara, who becomes flustered and walks away.
Betty and Jax go park on Lover’s Lane, and Jax is surprised at how forward Betty is. However, he suggests they get to know each other more first. He gets her to tell him about what happened to Tommy. But in the middle of her story, Tommy’s friends show up and drag Jax and Betty out of the car, and begin to beat Jax up. However, the monsters from the asylum attack them. Jax and Betty run and get inside the car. Monster Tommy jumps on top of the car and punches through the roof, scratching Betty’s neck. However, Jax is able to shake him off and drives away.
Unfortunately, a police car pulls him over and gets suspicious because Jax is with a white girl. Jax pleads with the sheriff, saying he needs to get medical attention for his friend, but the sheriff knocks Jax out and drags him away. Later, Rip and Snart are able to track Jax’s biosignature to the car, where they find Betty. They bring Betty back to the Waverider so that Gideon can heal her. There, Betty reveals that Tommy was a bird man, and that they figure out that Tommy was exposed to the same type of meteorite that Kendra came into contact with and gave her her powers.
Stein gets to work on finding a cure. Ray reveals that he obtained Savage’s dagger. Kendra is confident that she can take the dagger and kill Savage. Ray doesn’t like the idea of Kendra going alone, but she goes anyway. Sara confesses to Stein that when Nurse Carlisle kissed her, she was the one who freaked out, because after coming back from the dead, it was like being kissed for the first time.
The sheriff brings Jax to the asylum so that Savage can use him as his next test subject. Savage injects Jax with serum from the meteorite, and Jax transforms into a monster like Tommy. The sheriff tells Savage that he has a visitor — it’s Kendra, who’s waiting in his office for him. Kendra pretends to seduce him. Meanwhile, the rest of the team is stationed throughout the asylum.
When Kendra goes to grab the dagger from her purse, she finds that it is gone. It turns out Savage was onto her all along. Savage sets the monsters free so they can attack the rest of the team. He then attacks Kendra, but she fights back. Stein and Snart come across the monsters, and Snart uses his cold gun to kill a couple of them. However, they run into Jax, and Snart doesn’t want to shoot him. Instead, he shoots a pipe, and uses the steam as cover. The sheriff finds Rip and Ray snooping around, but one of the monsters attacks the sheriff, and Rip shoots the monster. There’s still another monster running around the asylum, but Sara beats it with her baton before it can hurt Nurse Carlisle.
Savage is about the stab Kendra, when Ray comes in and shoots him out the window. Stein and Snart run into Jax again, but Sara is able to knock him out. They bring Jax back to the Waverider, where Stein announces that Gideon was able to help him make a gene therapy to restore Jax and the others to their former selves. Stein praises Snart for helping to save Jax. After injecting Jax with the gene therapy, it begins to work.
Sara stops by to see Nurse Carlisle at the hospital. She reports that the other patients are back to normal. Sara and Nurse Carlisle share a kiss. She is very understanding that Sara has to go.
Jax gives Betty a car to make up for the one that got trashed. He also returns Tommy to her, then says his goodbyes.
At Kendra and Ray’s house, Kendra and Ray apologize to each other. Ray says that instead of an overprotective husband, she needs a partner. He sticks out his hand, and they shake on it. Then they kiss.
Jax returns to the Waverider and apologizes to Snart, saying now he knows Snart is not a monster, and that he gets what happened with Rory — that he was protecting them. While they’re still waiting on Kendra, Ray, and Sara to return, the ship comes under attack by Chronos, who gets into the ship. Jax wants to merge, while Stein is reluctant. Rip tells them to get to the jump ship. As Kendra, Ray, and Sara approach the Waverider, it suddenly flies off, and they wonder why they’ve been left behind.
Violet’s Thoughts on Season 1 Episode 8 of Legends of Tomorrow: Night of the Hawk
So this is the type of Legends of Tomorrow episode that I’ve been waiting for — and yet, in some ways, it turned out to be better than I expected! We had gotten a decent 1970s episode, though I didn’t feel quite as submersed in the 70s scene as I would have liked. Then we went to the 1980s and got pretty much no indication of the 80s culture, as we were stuck in the Cold War the whole time. Finally, we get an episode where we travel to the past and actually get a good feel for the time period, not only in the fashion, but also in the attitude of the time. Considering the fact that there are two black characters on the team, as well as an LGBT character, I was impressed with the way that the episode faced these racial, gender, and sexual orientation issues head on, rather than shying away from them and trying to sweep these issues under the rug.
I also must applaud the writers for what most certainly have been a wink to San Diego Comic-Con attendees by naming the psychotic restricted ward “Hall H.” Nice one.
I did find it a bit odd that although Betty’s boyfriend just recently went missing, she’s all too willing to go on a date with Jax – and seems to want to move pretty fast. Does she not care about her boyfriend being missing? She sure seemed happy to see him return to her at the end. The only thing that I can think of to explain this is that maybe the show was trying to point out that females weren’t quite as “buttoned up” as the time period likes to portray that they were – kind of like what the movie Pleasantville was trying to convey.
Overall though, I enjoyed this episode — except for the fact that they left us with a big cliffhanger, and then decided to take an extended break! How long will Kendra, Ray, and Sara be left behind in the 1950s, and what will happen to the others on the ship? For that matter, what really happened to Rory? Very much looking forward to the next episode!
Josh’s Thoughts: Legends of Tomorrow, Season 1 Episode 8: Night of the Hawk
I thought this was an interesting episode of Legends of Tomorrow. It was a horror episode mixed with a Happy Days/Archie flavor. I also liked how the episode painted the 50s a little more realistic though–dealing with race issues, sexist issues, and inter-racial issues. It made the episode feel a little more “grown up” in my opinion.
What I didn’t like was Sara’s weird attempt to seduce this woman. I had no problem with the lesbian aspect of it, but I would have found it more interesting if the two developed a relationship, and possibly turned into Sara potentially deciding to stay back in the 50s with this new love. That would be an interesting story to play out.
But at WonderCon there actually was a bit of a spoiler dropped by the actress who plays Kendra–which is that the three left behind might have been left behind for a lot longer than we might think. I wonder if this leads to Kendra and Ray developing a deeper relationship, and the same for Sara and her interest. That could be interesting to see, if it does play out this way.
What I do wonder is why can’t the Waverider comer back to the exact time they disappear and pick up the ones who were left behind ? I hope that is explained in the next episode, if that is the way the episode goes…
Scenes from Legends of Tomorrow, Season 1 Episode 9: Left Behind
Here are scenes from the next Legends of Tomorrow episode, titled Left Behind:
