Warning: major spoilers below! You know the drill. Don’t read this recap until you’ve seen the seventh episode of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow. You’ve been warned!

Before we dive too deeply into this week’s Legends of Tomorrow, we need to talk about the greatest love story on the show: Heat Wave a.k.a. Mick Rory (Dominic Purcell) and Captain Cold a.k.a. Leonard Snart (Wentworth Miller). The brotherly bond between these two has been one of the best parts both of this series and their previous stint on The Flash. Presumably, Miller and Purcell were hired together for these roles because of their past partnership on Prison Break. Their shared history has come across really well in their onscreen chemistry in the DC TV universe.

A few weeks ago, Legends of Tomorrow hinted at some cracks in that relationship when Snart and Mick escaped a Soviet Gulag, but it was the aftermath of their conflict in Star City 2046 that destroyed their bond in “Marooned.” And honestly, it’s Rip Hunter’s (Arthur Darvill) fault. Ol’ Rip has turned out to be really bad at this whole Captain thing, and he successfully managed to alienate Mick while they were captives of the Time Pirates. Yes, Mick betrayed the team in the hopes of returning to 2016, but Rip practically drove him to it. A few different word choices could have made the all of the difference.

Neither Mick nor Snart were blameless in the dissolution of their partnership. Snart violated Mick’s trust in 2046 and punched him out, and there’s no way to oversell the significance of Mick turning on the team. Even after their mutual anger at each other, Mick still offered Snart a chance to side with him. Instead, Snart chose to stay with Hunter’s team and solidified his betrayal of his partner.

This episode did a good job of establishing the backstory of Mick and Snart as children, and it didn’t take the easy route of leaving Mick on the Waverunner after he turned on the team. Snart also had a very compelling reason to keep Mick from going back home to 2016: nearly everyone on the team has family there that Mick could hurt in retaliation. So instead, Snart brought Mick out to the woods in an unknown time period and he seemingly executed him. I say “seemingly” because I don’t trust Legends of Tomorrow to have removed Mick with any real finality halfway through the first season. That robbed the ending of most of its power, as it would have been stunning to see Snart go through with the murder of his best friend.

The other successful love story in this episode occurred in the Arrow-style flashbacks with Hunter and his wife (Alex Duncan), who was revealed to be a Time Master before they were married. That was a very clever way to bring her back for an episode, and it moved Hunter’s ongoing sense of loss from an abstract concept to something more tangible and relatable. The opening scene of Hunter replaying messages from his wife and son was also very effective at showing us what Hunter lost and why he’s so driven to get them back.

That said, Hunter is kind of a moron sometimes. After receiving a distress call from another time ship called the Akeron, Hunter led a team of himself, Mick, Jax (Franz Drameh), and Professor Stein (Victor Garber) to steal the other ship’s temporal database… but they walked right into the trap of the Time Pirates, who came off as second-rate Ravagers from Guardians of the Galaxy. It was also very lazy writing for the pirates to be defeated the same way in Hunter’s flashbacks as they were later in the episode. Venting out the spaceship should have only been done once, not twice, in a single episode!

This episode was almost too self-aware when it came to all of the Star Trek references. While some of it was endearing, there’s no way around some of the narrative shortcuts, including Stein’s inexplicable off-screen victory over one of the Time Pirates. Seriously?! That was probably the least believable thing in the episode… or, at least it was until Kendra (Ciara Renée) and Ray (Brandon Routh) locked lips. Frickin’ CW… just when we thought that the dumb and extremely forced romance subplot from last week was over, it came back out of nowhere after Ray nearly died during his space walk.

That near-death experience was no excuse, as Kendra and Ray proved that they had no chemistry together during their conversation while he was trying to fix the ship’s hull breach. Considering the fact that Ray had a limited oxygen supply in his suit, shouldn’t he have not been wasting his air by talking?! There aren’t words for how stupid this was.

It’s been far more convincing to see Snart and Sara (Caity Lotz) bond because they aren’t jumping into each others’ arms and making out. They’ve been getting closer, but there aren’t any overt romantic overtures between them. They may not even be interested in each other as romantic partners, but their connection is one of the few relationships that Legends of Tomorrow hasn’t completely bungled.

The fight between the team on the Waverider and the time pirates was well staged, and there were actual stakes in the fight between Sara and Mick before Snart intervened. If the ending hadn’t been so ambiguous, this could have have been a very powerful episode. Instead, we’re waiting for the inevitable cheat that either brings Mick back into the fold or reintroduces him as one of the season’s main villains…possibly alongside Vandal Savage (Casper Crump).

It should be noted that the team’s new strategy of attacking Savage even further in the past has merit, because they’ve screwed up the element of surprise after their first mission 1975. At this rate, it’s more likely that Hunter and his team will only make things worse with their next attempt.

There were parts of this episode that had some of the show’s best moments to date, but Legends of Tomorrow has yet to land a truly great episode. I don’t have a lot of faith in the ending that it gave us. This could have been a fantastic way to close out Mick’s story, but his return is probably inevitable.

What did you think about the seventh episode of Legends of Tomorrow? Let us know in the comment section below!

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Image Credits: DC Entertainment/The CW