TV REVIEWS: FTN Reviews Legends of Tomorrow Season 7 Episode 8: Paranoid Android

Sorry about the old images, the data wipe last year happened right as Legends went onto their break, we’ll be good next week!

Which is good, because hopefully by next week…Legends will be good again.

I’ve never been afraid to say what I like and don’t like in shows and movies (see my Superman & Lois then my Naomi reviews from yesterday for proof) but rarely, if ever, do I give something a 1/5 because there usually is always something to make it good. But tonight’s episode of LOT, “Paranoid Android” had nothing IMO that was good. Instead, we got a super over-the-top episode that made no sense from top to bottom, and yet they spent the whole episode trying to convince us it was logical.

So, following the mid-season finale, we found out that Gideon’s new plan was to make clone androids of the Legends to hunt down the Legends. I knew from the start this was going to be bad, but I didn’t know how bad…until this episode hit. Because from the start, we got not just intentional over-the-top acting, but we were told that the Android Legends thought that they were the REAL Legends…and you could very easily tell where that was going to go.

But just as bad, it didn’t make sense that Gideon would do this super elaborate plan! Think about it. She (through Bishop and the original Dr. Sharpe) had made androids that would act like the person they replicated but also ensure the timeline was fine. That was ok per se in that context because it would allow certain things to stay on track (even though if you really think about it this wouldn’t work at all, but I’ll leave that breakdown for another time).

But here, she wasn’t trying to replace historical figures, she was mocking the Legends by using fake Legends to save history. So given all of that…why have them with personalities at all? She had seen first hand via Bishop and Ava what happens when emotions and instinct get in the way of the mission. So why did she let the Legends be ANYTHING like their former selves, instead of just being emotionless beings to get the mission done?

It doesn’t make sense for a supercomputer like Gideon to do that. And yet, not only did she do that, she made a Dr. Sharpe (someone she killed before if you recall) to “monitor” the fake Legends all so…she could see if they were up to snuff?

And this doesn’t even touch on the fact that she “amped up” both their personalities and their abilities (see: Nate’s arms) to a stupid level for no reason that…to make them more ruthless? They’re androids! You can do that WITHOUT the personalities! See: the Terminator.

Then, naturally, when some of them (in this case Sara and Zari) start to figure things out, Gideon doesn’t stop them immediately (despite having eyes all over the ship and ways to kill them on the spot) and Zari is easily tricked into letting Gideon reprogram her despite her KNOWING that Gideon couldn’t be trusted.

Everything was just so ham-fisted, ham-acted, and just plain dumb that I well and truly found myself fast-forwarding things because I wanted to get through the episode. The worst part is that they COULD have made this good with simple adjustments.

The fact that the Legends (the real Legends) honestly have screwed up the timeline via their acts was compelling, and it makes sense when you think about it. But showing it in the way they did, and how they handled the fake Legends just made it pretty much unbearable to watch.

And where did it get us in the end? In the place we should have been in the beginning more or less. That’s why I have to say that “Paranoid Android” might just be the worst Legends of Tomorrow episode ever.

1/5