'DC's Legends of Tomorrow' Season 5 Ending Explained: Bad ideas, Tarazi timelines and alien abductions
Spoilers for 'DC's Legends of Tomorrow' Season 5, Episode 15 'Swan Thong'
The Legends have done it once again - they've saved the world and have done it in the most ridiculous way possible. As is typical with the Legends, they may have fixed everything, but they've done a sloppy job of it and we take a look at just how things have been left off as this season draws to a close.
The fate of the Fates
With the Legends free, they go about removing Fates from power, after the Fates used the Loom to alter reality and create a totalitarian regime. Using her predictive powers, Sara Lance (Caity Lotz) goes head to head with Atropos (Joanna Vanderham) and with the help of the Tarazi siblings, ends her life. In the meanwhile, Astra Logue (Olivia Swann) uses her innate magical conduit to be able to destroy the Loom permanently, with the help of John Constantine (Matt Ryan).
The Legends make their escape by hopping four months into the future. In that time, with the Loom destroyed, people's memories of a Fateless world start returning to them. However, they've grown so used to the Fates telling them what to do that their newfound memories and free will confuse them. Lachesis (Sarah Strange) takes advantage of this and uses Gideon (Amy Pemberton) to create a FateWatch, that tells people what to do. It turns out that Lachesis herself has no power, only the illusion of control. Once the two Zari Tarazis (Tala Ashe) disable Gideon, Lachesis loses even that illusion and the world is saved.
Destroying the Loom had an additional side-effect - it made the Fates mortal, as Charlie (Maise Richardson-Sellers) tells Lachesis that she's human now. However, this may not mean that the Fates can't live forever - after all, Charlie lived for centuries with her shapeshifting powers - only now they can be killed. Charlie chooses to forgive Lachesis and then leaves the Legends to go back to the past and establish roots with her band, the Smell. The Smell had been killed by Atropos, but apparently Atropos's death brought them back to life.
One last Encore performance
The Encores were presumed to be this season's main villains before the Fates took over and they appear one last time in the finale. Lachesis summoned them all from Hell and kept them in statis in the Museum of history, as examples of the worst of examples of humanity's free will. She uses their soul coins to bring them out of stasis to fight the Legends, but armed with the Hell arsenal the Legends gained in 'The Great British Fake Off,' they take the Encores out once and for all, finishing this season's original mission.
Zari, not Zari
Last episode, Charlie twisted Zari Tarazi's (Tala Ashe) Fate thread, allowing Zaris from two separate timelines to exist in one place. However, in the original Zari's timeline, Behrad Tarazi (Shayan Sobhian) was killed. With Zari 1.0 back in existence, the timestream attempts to make the events of that timeline come to pass, which is what leads to a bullet hole appearing in Behrad's chest. In order to save Behrad's life, Zari 1.0 voluntarily returns to a life inside the Talisman. While this saves Behrad's life, it's worth noting that Zari 1.0 is not erased from the timeline - meaning that this may not be the last we've seen of her.
Sara's sight and spiriting away
Sara Lance's (Caity Lotz) was made blind but granted precognitive powers in her battle with Atropos. However, killing Atropos took away those powers from Sara, which had the fortunate side effect of restoring her sight. This is a bit of a surprise, as the showrunners for 'Legends of Tomorrow' have said that Sara would be getting powers next season, and most fans assumed that that referred to Sara's precognition. Given her abrupt abduction by aliens in the final moments of the finale, however, her new powers might come from somewhere else entirely.
However, the synopsis for Season 6, which details that the Legends would be fighting aliens, includes this, "They must recruit a new Legend, a woman who was abducted by aliens when she was a child and supposedly imbued with powers that will help the team defeat their intergalactic foes. Either that or she’s just crazy..."
It would appear that whoever the aliens are, they imbue their abductees with superpowers. This definitely points to the return of the Dominators, who in the comics imbued many DC metahumans with their powers. The Dominators have not been seen since the Arrowerse 'Invasion!' crossover in 2016, but they just might be coming back.
'DC's Legends of Tomorrow' will return for Season 6 in 2021, on The CW.