Legacies 1x16, There’s Always a Loophole
It's finally here. The prophesied day has arrived. We are finally at the season finale of Legatrash. And I'm sure to no one's surprise, the episode wasn't that great, it was pretty cringey, actually.
As always, this is a critical review of Legacies, I'm not a fan of the show. If you are a fan, that's totally cool, I don't judge, you do you, we like what we like but you may want to avoid this one. It's not exactly Legacies-positive. And of course, there will be spoilers for the episode and the entire season potentially.
So, Legacies, 1x16, There's Always a Loophole happened and I'm just like, "Is this really the finale? Why on earth was it so boring?" 15 minutes passed in this episode and it felt like I had been watching for 30. So, I guess it was a typical Legatrash episode. What did I really expect? This episode doesn't exactly have me counting down the days until season 2. The only thing that could possibly get me to watch Season 2 is Lizzie and I honestly don't know if I'm willing to put myself through that despite my adoration for Lizzie...because, boy howdy, they did her dirty in this episode.
So let's do a recap. The previous episode left off with Landon agreeing to help his brother find the final artifact that will free Malivore. In this episode, Hope begins to assemble the Avengers (and I hate that they call themselves that) to rescue Landon from the Triad but as they're about to leave, the Triad invades the school because they believe the final artifact is some chalice that's supposedly at the school. The students are unable to defend themselves as there's a creepy blood fountain in a hidden passageway underneath the school that when activated, stops magic. So the students are completely defenseless and since there are no fucking teachers in this school to help protect these students from this exact situation (aka the reason this school was started in the first place) and the headmaster is conveniently MIA to recruit Dorian (who I still have no idea what exactly he does for the school or why it's so important that he's there) the students have no choice but to comply. Hope despite Alaric telling her otherwise and in all of her typical self-entitled glory, decides she's going to disobey the Triad but Josie, trying to protect Lizzie, gets shot with a magic witch bullet forged from Malivore so at least Hope faces some sort of consequences for her self-entitled bratty behavior (more about this scene later, I have intense feelings of rage about this scene that I need to let out). Hope, Lizzie, and Josie end up locked in the school's dungeon and Josie is slowly dying but MG shows up to rescue them. Hope goes to try and figure out the off-switch for the Magical Fountain of Blood and MG rallies the school to get ready to attack the Triad. Alaric eventually shows up, turns off the fountain, makes a brief excuse on why he knows how to turn off the fountain, and the students are able to get to work. The Triad gets defeated and MG has his totally undeserved coming-of-age moment. Lizzie is in huge distress because she can't siphon away the magic in the bullet that's currently residing in Josie's chest and she now fears that Josie is going to die. But Hope has that covered as she gave Alaric a vial of her blood as she deduced that her blood would be able to counteract Malivore's effects. Josie is saved. Alaric reveals that the Triad was able to take advantage of them because of him. He was the one who set up the fountain as a precaution in case things at the school got out of hand and he also, for some reason, taught the parents how to use it, so since MG's mother is a member of the Triad, she told the Triad how to use it. Alaric tells the school they need to decide if Alaric should still continue to be the headmaster. I vote no but that's for reasons completely unrelated to this. We cut over to what's going on with Landon and the brother (for the life of me, I can't remember his name so he's just known as the Douchey Bro from here on out). Douchey Bro realizes Landon is double-crossing him and that he lied about the chalice being the final artifact but he's in luck as Landon unfortunately possesses this ability to subconsciously steal artifacts without realizing it. The final artifact appears to be a magical shiv (it was either a shiv or a magical box-cutter, I couldn't quite tell). But as per usual, a monster shows up, the headless horseman to be exact, and Landon decides to take the shiv and allow the horseman to abduct him and take him to Malivore. I don't necessarily understand why he does this if his goal is to stop Malivore from being opened but whatever, I've just learned to roll with it. Landon also found out that he exists to be the host for Malivore so yeah, that's a thing. As the horseman throws the shiv into Malivore, Hope arrives in all of her Mary Sue glory and uses her Mary Sue powers to stop the shiv from falling into Malivore. She then fights the horsemen and eventually kills it, she and Landon have their reunion where they exchange proclamations of love (which made me want to barf) and they're eventually interrupted by Douchey Bro showing up and throwing the shiv into Malivore. And by the powers of plot convenience, Hope conveniently forgets that she has the ability to stop the shiv in midair and instead lets the shiv fall into Malivore. Landon, in an uncharateristic and impulsive fit of rage, kills his brother. Landon killing his brother felt extremely uncharacteristic for him to do, if anything, that feels like something Hope would do but whatever. Hope realizes that as the Mary Sue plot device that she is, she's the key to closing Malivore. She snaps Landon's neck which I found kind of uncalled for seeing as if her goal was only to stop Landon from interfering, she could've just used some witch mojo and knocked him unconscious, why put him through the trauma of resurrection if she doesn't have to? Something tells me we're eventually going to get the Gilbert ring plot point where Landon eventually turns evil from going through the trauma of death and resurrection so often. Hope calls Alaric and in a scene that frankly made me feel very uncomfortable, Hope says goodbye to Alaric and instructs him to burn anything that could remind anyone of her. And she takes Douchey Bro (who just recently resurrected himself) down into Malivore with her. And the episode ends with people feeling like they've forgotten something.
Well, let's start with positive first. My favorite part of the episode was the students rising up and fighting back against the Triad. Those are the kinds of moments that makes Legacies kind of work, in part because it's less about the show hanging onto its TVD/TO roots and moreso about it being its own thing. One of my favorite moments in this entire season (and yes, I do have some moments I didn't hate in this show) was early in the season when we had the students playing that football game. You see, this show, premise-wise, isn't actually that bad if it weren't attached to TVD franchise. If this show were its own thing wherein it's just about students attending a boarding school for the supernatural and saving the world one episode at a time while also trying to figure out how to live with eachother with no ties to TVD, it could actually be pretty self-sufficient. Sure, it's a trope done to death, but tropes are tropes for a reason. By not being tied to TVD franchise, it allows the characters and the story to morph into its own thing in ways that the story as a spin-off can't really do. It'll always be tied to the rules of TVD and never be able to evolve into its own thing.
And of course, another thing I liked was the return of Lizzie's overall outfits. I totally love Lizzie in overalls and I sincerely hope season 2 has more of that kind of wardrobe for her.
So let's get into this. Can I just point out how incredibly rich it is that Josie calls Lizzie, of all people, a victim? Josie is doing an awful lot of deflecting here to avoid dealing with her own victim complex. There was also a lot of bickering between the twins regarding the gemini curse. Mainly dealing with Lizzie's insecurity that when the merge happens, she feels she'll lose the merge and be absorbed into Josie. She feels this way as she's the "broken" twin, the weak twin, and I just want to hug Lizzie and tell her everything's going to be alright. Lizzie truly is too pure for this world. And I actually still maintain that if the merge does happen, Lizzie could potentially win because what Lizzie doesn't understand is that even though she does have some real issues she has to contend with, those issues have morphed her. It's given her an extremely understated strength that no one else has really noticed because they're not paying attention, they're only seeing her illness and not the person behind the illness. So yeah, Josie's magic might be stronger, Josie might not be the “broken twin”, but Lizzie has a strength about her that Josie could never hope to achieve.
Alright, lets talk about the scene where Josie gets shot. I hate that it was Josie that got shot. I certainly don't want to see Lizzie get shot but it would've been amazing for her character arc and to really hammer into Josie that things aren't so black and white with Lizzie, Lizzie does care about things. But instead the show made it about Josie taking the bullet for Lizzie, essentially making everything about Josie and I didn't like that, it just plays more into the Josie-victim complex. It really doesn't take a genius to see which sister is the writers' favorite. In fact, I mentioned earlier that this show really did Lizzie dirty and that's from a standpoint of they really didn't give Lizzie anything to do here besides crying for her sister. This is the season finale, the time for some witch bad-assery and we got nothing from Lizzie. Hell, even when Hope was sacrificing herself and everyone was starting to forget Hope, we didn't see Lizzie at all in those sequence of events. You know, the one person whose relationship with Hope I actually liked and we didn't get to see the moments of her forgetting about Hope. Or it could've been done intentional. Maybe the whole thing next season is that for some reason, Lizzie remembers Hope and tries to bring her back. Although, honestly, it would make more sense for Josie seeing as Josie is the one who ingested Hope's blood. And I get how I might be coming off here. Being super angry about not enough Lizzie content and I could feel bad about it, but screw that. Lizzie is the only reason I put up with this show. I'm not too big into stan-ing culture but when you're watching a show and you only like one character, it's hard to not stan. But really what makes me angry about how this episode all went down in terms of Lizzie is that everything that Lizzie's character arc throughout the season had been buliding up to...nothing happened, there was no pay-off to it. They put Lizzie through so much and then they did nothing with it. So I think I’m allowed to be angry about that.
Let's talk about Hope's good-bye and the weird relationship she and Alaric continue to have. They first meet up in the blood fountain area and once again, the energy between these two is super weird and uncomfortable. They see each other and it looks like they want to run into each other's arms and make-out. Then, in Hope's good-bye call, it doesn't feel like she's saying good bye to a friend or a family member, it sounds like she's saying good-bye to a lover. Writers, if you fix anything at all next season, please fix this weird creepy feeling Alaric and Hope seem to be exuding whenever they're in the same scene together. You may be going for a Buffy and Giles, mentor/student type of relationship, but trust me, it's not working. And then we have this moment with Hope where she talks about how all of the kids at school are her friends and she was a fool to not see it before and I couldn't help my eye-roll. The show spent so much time making Hope the tragic hero who everyone is against and the fact that she's so self-absorbed she would put Clary Fray to shame, I find it difficult to believe she even knows a quarter of the student body's names. This is a nice proclamation but not at all earned.
And I also want to point out just how incredibly unbelievable it is that this boarding school is an actual school. They have like 50 some kids there of differing ages and only 3 adults we ever see at the school and one of them is the headmaster, another is a therapist and I don't know what the other one does. How are all of these students being "schooled"? This episode really hammered that question in for me. I always knew there were only three named adults at the school but I always just kind of figured there were other teachers just hanging out in the background but apparently not. It's just Alaric, the therapist and Dorian. I have no idea how these kids are getting a fully fledged education nor do I understand how this school maintains its accreditation.
So MG has this completely undeserved moment where he's revered as "becoming a man." First off, I hate the character of MG. I think he's super cringey and the actor while maybe not a bad actor, he definitely isn't doing the character any favors with his portrayal. A nerd character should be fun, full of fun and socially awkward quirks that exude charisma, that is not the case with MG. I should find his nerd quirks charming but instead, I find them annoying and I find him as a character annoying. And of course, there's also the part where he's barely spent half the season on screen so I definitely don't buy into this "becoming a man" part of his character arc. I buy way more into Kaleb as a character than I do MG. But essentially, one of the Triad soldiers gets turned into stone by the Medusa creature that's still hanging around for some reason and Kaleb attempts to shatter the stone. MG stops him and says that they need to be better than this guy. And I'm just like, "really? Better than this Triad soldier guy who shot a defenseless teenage girl simply because he could and was going to shoot a bunch of defenseless six-year-old kids?" I'm not saying kill the guy but letting him off scot-free is not my idea of justice. It's also really rich coming from MG who basically had Rafael wolf-out just moments before to seriously maim the Triad soldiers. And then MG's mother pops around and apologizes for what the Triad soldiers did and tells them it was never meant to be taken as far as it did and assures them the scumbag soldier will never be allowed on the field again. And I'm just like, "Again, this guy shot a defenseless teenage girl with a magical bullet designed to kill her in excruciating pain because he wanted to and was going to do the same thing to a bus load of six-year-old kids." You better do a hell of a lot better than just putting this guy on "desk duty". There better be a trial and he better be sent to prison. This guy clearly is not fit to be around any living beings, human or otherwise.
As is typical for any Legatrash episode, this was really boring and when it comes right down to it, the most egregious thing about this show is just how boring it is, how badly structured the episodes are. The show, while not only boring, also had very little pay-off that frankly did a huge disservice to the show premise-wise. Here's my idea for the finale. Hope and the twins decide to go after Landon but are stopped by the Triad as they attempt to leave the school. The Triad is doing this because they have a nefarious plot to do with Landon and they want to stop the school from interfering. The student body then rises up against the Triad and is able to get Hope and the twins out of the school. This entire season should've been built around the student body learning to put their differences aside all to culminate in this moment where they can work together to defeat this army and as Hope and the twins are about to leave the school to go save Landon, Hope asks the students why they would do this for someone they barely know and the students could respond with, "Landon's one of us, we protect our own". So the three girls go out to save Landon, we have a moment when infiltrating the Triad where Lizzie takes the bullet for Josie and Hope, she's dying and Hope and Josie are in tears over the thought of losing Lizzie and in this moment Hope realizes she's resistant to Malivore and realizes her blood can save Lizzie. Hope leaves Lizzie and Josie as Lizzie recuperates from being shot and Hope goes to save Landon and much of the same thing from the episode plays out. This way, there's actual pay-off to things this episode was trying to allude to but did nothing to legitimately earn.
This episode had some fun stuff so I'll give it a C+ but really, this was an absolute disappointment of a finale. No finale should be as boring as this episode was. But bright side is that it’s finally over...at least for a few months anyway.
