As the name suggests,Legends of Tomorrow’s third Season 6episode, “The Ex-Factor” features ex-lovers and old relationships, and how people confront their past selves. Most centrally DJ S’More (a parody ofDJ Marshmellofrom Season 5’s “A Head of Her Time”), the ex-boyfriend of Zari (Tale Ashe) who now hoststhe singing competition “Da Throne.”So, “The Ex-Factor” is also a pun on talent shows likeThe X-FactororAmerica’s Got Talent. When the robotic alien warrior Lord Knoxicrillion lands in 2045 Hollywood, in a classic bit of Legends’ glorious stupidity, it mistakes “Da Throne” forEarth’s literal Crownand enters the competition to take over the planet.
Zari therefore also enters the competition, counting on her “Dragon Girl”social influencerstatus to steal the show. However, in her old orbit, Zari reverts to her old fame-and-glam obsessed lifestyle, highlighting the differences with current “fling”John Constantine (Matt Ryan).Constantine’s shaggy and underground punk outlook clashes with Zari’s hyper-pop princess, and others joking he’s a “street magician” and giving him a makeover as a “Criss Angel” lookalike only intensifies his discomfort. “The Ex-Factor” addresses the two’s divergent aesthetics and questions their relationship trajectory, making them disorganized in their campaign against Lord Knox.
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Lord Knox is a special component of “The Ex-Factor,” its serious space-warrior commands hilariously contrasting the silly episode set-up. The Legends actually easily capture Knox early on and reveal the “song-and-dance” nature of “Da Throne,” but Knox threatens intergalactic invasion if the competition rules go unhonoured, and stays in the show remarkably unphased. Knox even gives interviews about potential bombshells (responding “I detect no explosives in the vicinity!”) and steals Zari’s“female empowerment anthem”(as on its planet “we do not follow a binary gender construct!”) for the show’s finale.
At the start of “The Ex-Factor,” Zari and Constantine made out while The Buzzcocks’ “Even Fallen in Love” played in the background. Constantine rhapsodized about “the buzz of excitement that you get when you play something that’s true and real.” Zari has rebuilt her “empowerment slogans” and fake filters through the episode, including telling her mother how she and Constantine won’t last long together.
But the climax of the episode has Zari relinquish such artificiality, singing an acapella version of the Buzzcocks’ from the heart. Tale Ashe proved her singing ability in “Séance and Sensibility,” and in this moment “The Ex-Factor” is unexpectedly raw. The lyrics of how “we won’t be together much longer / unless we realize that we are the same” reverberate with the episode’s themes of seeing past superficial differences, and letting go of past anxieties to take steps into the future.
Mick Rory (Dominic Purcell) is also facing Exes. Not in the romantic sense, but rather abandonment issues over being the only Season 1 OG Legend now that Sara (Caity Lotz) is abducted, exacerbated by how his daughter has left for college and is too busy to return his calls. Rory has never been the most vulnerable Legend, and he couches such feelings in (more than usual) day-drinking and disinterest in new recruit Spooner (Lisseth Chavez). Although Ava (Jes Macallan) gives him a talking to, creating renewed purpose to track down Sara’s alien abductor Kayla – which“Ground Control to Sara Lance” revealedwas actually Gary (Adam Tsekhman)’s (now ex) fiancé.
Gary uses Kayla’s alien-tentacle techniqueto dispatch the soldiers gathering around the poisoned Sara. While Sara herself doesn’t exactly have to face her Exes, she does express how “If I hadn’t done unforgivable things to survive, I never would have made it out the other side. Now, Ava is my other side.” And its ironically revealed these soldiers are the mass-produced clones of Ava from her origin. Sara, still disorientated from last episode’s poison, stumbles away from Gary to follow one of them. Sara’s scenes in “The Ex-Factor” are fairly short, but they do bring her face-to-face with Season 6’s overarching villain Bishop (Raffi Barsoumian), who ominously claims he’s “been waiting a long time” for her.
Occasionally, “The Ex-Factor” feels trimmed down from a larger episode. Fun jokes about Nate (Nick Zano) and Behrad (Shayan Sobhian) being Zari’s “makeover” team, for instance, exist mostly on the side-lines without much focus.Legends of Tomorrowhas struggled this season to extent attention to the whole team, and even Ava and Sponer spend most of the episode watching “Da Bomb” on TV. Similarly, the show’s “virtual audience” of online fans actually downplays the show’s apparent scope, awkwardly cutting to similar reaction shots that take viewers out of the episode. As does the copious somewhat corny references to social media slang.
However,Legends of Tomorrowclearly isn’t trying to be too serious in its discussion of social media, and its tongue-in-cheek presentation extends to the silly “singing competition” premise (with the Legends being amazed “Network TV still exists” in 2045). “The Ex-Factor” keepsLegends’ fun and outlandish humor, but also adds oddly sincere statements of giving up on past hang-ups and exes, and embracing the future.
Legends of Tomorrowairs on Sundays on the CW.
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