There’s a lot to like about “Meat: The Legends,” the second episode in Legends of Tomorrow’s sixth season. The problem is the good bits are generally disconnected from the main plot of the episode, and the rest of it just wasn’t very good. Our first episode to really jump into the season’s arc picks up right where the last one left off: with an alien floating through the timestream, getting smushed on the windshield of the Waverider. From there, the gang picks up a sign of trouble from October, 1955, where they find a newly retconned massacre in San Bernardino that points to an alien culprit. We see a local fast food joint that is rapidly taking off, and some people in town with very mysterious cravings for meat, so the team splits in two: Mick, Constantine, Ava and Spooner (who finds out backhandedly from Behrad that there’s no alien communications device in her brain for Gideon to take out) head out into town to find out more about the alien, while Nate, Behrad and Zari stay at the burger joint to see what they can discover. Eventually they find out that the cravings are coming from the restaurant’s “secret sauce,” and Ava runs it back to the restaurant owner’s wife, where she discovers an alien cocoon, leaking pus through their house’s air ducts, which the wife jars and hands off to her husband. This obviously outstanding idea ends up shockingly backfiring when a giant alien moth bursts out of the cocoon and eats the wife before bursting through the roof of the house to go eat the rest of the town, which it has intentionally been fattening up for the slaughter. There are still parts of the episode that worked. We get a decent amount of Behrad character development packed into a couple of interactions – we find out that he wasn’t happy living in Zari’s shadow, and that’s led to some reluctance on his part to give up the Air Totem. It’s a nice moment for him, some depth that we’re certain to follow up on after the end of the episode, where pre-Crisis Zari (now living inside the totem) decides to make a copy for Instazari so both her and her brother can be superheroes. And Sara and Gary – crashed on a planet and tricked into having dinner with an alien who appears to be Amelia Earhart – get a couple of nice, quiet character moments as well.
