We recap the only Arrowverse episode to air this week: Legends of Tomorrow 3×11 “Here I Go Again.”
“Here I Go Again” is a Zari-centric episode that helped Zari find her place among the Legends. Since her introduction, we haven’t spent a ton of time with her. She’s been enjoyable in the background, especially in her unexpected dynamic with Ray and her constant enjoyment of food, but it was good to focus on her some more.
After overloading Gideon by running a simulation to look for loopholes in time that would help her save her brother and 2042, Zari has a fight with Sara when Sara orders her to fix the ship. Zari doesn’t take orders well but does the repairs — only to be sprayed in the face with time goop. She barely has time to register this as the ship explodes.
When Zari reawakens in the midst of her fight with Sara, she realizes she’s in the middle of a time loop. At first she tries to stop the ship from exploding on her own but fails, so she turns to Nate for help. Nate recognizes Zari’s issue immediately, so she only has to tell him “Groundhog Day” each time the day resets for him to help her out.
One thing Legends does so well is create unexpected pairings (Mick and Amaya has been one of my favorites) between characters, which allows us to get to know them in new and interesting ways. Zari and Nate is another example of these unusual pairings that I never knew I needed.
There is something endearing about the way the cynical Zari finds herself paired with optimistic people like Ray and Nate. Though she says things like Nate and Amaya’s romance makes her want to puke, the fact that she purposefully spends her time with these people tells me more about who Zari really is: there’s something mushy underneath her haunted, tough exterior.
Nate suggests Zari use some of her reboots to have fun because there are no consequences (leading to some of the most hilarious sequences in the episode, like Zari using cue cards for a conversation Ray and Mick have over laundry and Zari trying on different Legends’ costumes). And he is the one to recognize what comes after the fun is no longer fun.
Exhausted by her inability to save the team, who she has gotten to know intimately over the course of her many hours — from Mick’s secret hobby of writing a sci-fi romance to Sara’s flirtation with Ava — she tries to shoot herself. The gun doesn’t work, though. After all the humor, it’s a big tonal shift. But it works. This catches the rest of the team’s attention, and she tells them about the time loop and the bomb.
Zari hasn’t looked in the garbage chute, and there they discover Gary (who I have missed dearly). He heard about the Waverider‘s explosion so created the loop to give them an hour to save themselves. However, Mick destroys the box that controlled the loop, meaning the team has only a few minutes to find the bomb or die for real.
They eventually discover the bomb, but with only precious moments left and no ability to throw the bomb out a door without Gideon, Zari takes the bomb and gives her final speech to the team. She wants Mick to keep writing, Ray to continue being good, Nate and Amaya to embrace their love and Sara to let happiness into her life.
This is a heart-wrenching scene, as the team pleads with her to let them help. But Zari is past her breaking point and just wants her newfound family to be safe and happy — unlike her late brother.
While I didn’t expect Zari to die, I was surprised by the reveal. The whole thing, it turns out, was a simulation by Gideon. After getting sprayed with time goop, Zari was taken to the med bay to heal. While there, Gideon uploaded her consciousness into her mainframe.
Gideon reveals that Zari needs to work with the Legends to save 2042. In most timelines, her fight with Sara caused her to leave, so Gideon created the simulation to cause Zari to bond with her team.
And it worked. Zari tells her friends the lessons she learned in the simulation — Ray, for instance, has to admit to Sara that Constantine said he might have to kill her; to his surprise, she agrees with Constantine — and Sara agrees that they should try to save 2042.
It was nice to see this relationship between two strong, stubborn women come full circle over the course of the episode as Zari finally realized how important she is to the team and how important the team is to her.
Legends is one of the few shows that could successfully navigate the many tonal shifts this episode undergoes without losing its emotional resonance, and it does so expertly.
The episode closes in China as Rip Hunter tracks down a meditating Wally West: he wants to recruit the speedster to help save the world. Yay, Wally!