The big plot news of this episode is the reunification of the team, after several episodes travelling apart. Gideon, Spooner and Astra finally catch up to the rest of the gang in New York City, just in time to stop them from electrocuting themselves on the malfunctioning time platform of one Dr. Gwyn Davies, the mad scientist working for Thomas Edison (yes, that Thomas Edison) who claims a “divine purpose” to his time travel experiments. The team keeps mistaking him for a distant relative of various old crewmates – Sara thinks he’s a young Professor Stein, others think he’s a relative of Ray Palmer, one even mistook him for a Rory.
He is, of course, played by the returning Matt Ryan, who plays Davies as a neurotic mess, a pretty significant departure from his previous visit to the Waverider as John Constantine.
The team encounters Davies in their quest to find a time machine and get back to a place where the Time Bureau’s resources will let them dig into who’s hunting them. He’s got an almost fully functional time platform in his enormous NYC apartment, and they try and steal it (to then replace it in the instant it left) and get to 2021 Tahiti.
In my mind, there are three big outstanding mysteries that need to be addressed…
Who is Gwyn Davies?
These shows have done the “aren’t you familiar” bit in the past, with Brandon Routh’s Ray Palmer saying that Kara Davners “looks like [his] cousin” during the Invasion crossover a few years back. While that was a nice joke referencing Routh’s turn as the big-screen Superman, the jokes about Davies, made by almost everyone on the show, feel a little bit too visible to not be pointing towards some kind of plot twist. The fact that nobody has pinned Constantine on him yet, but that people are still doing it at the end of the episode, feels like something’s still up here.
If something is up, it’s probably not the thing we all jumped to: Legends of Tomorrow showrunner Phil Klemmer had a ton to say about Ryan’s return when we spoke with him earlier this fall.
