Headless fire fights, & Constantine runs out of time in the latest Legends of Tomorrow

We get two fairly parallel stories this week, as the team heads to the 1700s France to stop an encore; and Constantine confronts his past — while it simultaneously catches up with him in a big way.

Spoilers ahead for “A Head of Her Time,” the latest episode of The CW’s Legends of Tomorrow, which aired Tuesday, February 18, 2020.

Legends of Tomorrow has always been one of those shows that can balance the fantastically goofy and brutally dark all in the same episode (and sometimes the same scene), and “A Head of Her Time” was a perfect example of threading that needle.

The team story follows the crew, led by Ava as interim captain (Sara is off-screen handling some business, leaving the former Time Bureau chief in charge) as they head to France circa 1793. Turns out the French Revolution isn’t exactly playing out as scheduled. The reason? Marie Antoinette is alive and kicking, with her head reattached and partying it up. It seems her new lease on life has inspired a plan to quell the brewing revolution — she invited the revolutionaries to party it up, hit them with her magic perfume, and now they’ll party all night until they literally drop dead from exhaustion.

Zari, who is back on the ship but still doesn’t remember her old life from before the timeline shift, tags along on the mission to help out. Turns out her lifetime of being a social media influencer and socialite comes in handy while infiltrating a who’s who of French royals. Zari schmoozes her way into the party, and even comes up with a plan to lure Marie out and get hr secured on the Waverider. The plan? Convince her there’s a cooler after-party she’s missing. It works, mostly, though in classic Legends fashion things go awry along the way.

Marie bangs into a column and her head comes toppling right back off, with the Legends now holding onto her talking head and fumbling body in two separate pieces. The Marie story allows Zari 2.0 a chance to do a bit of soul searching, as she connects with Marie about simply being on the outside and trying so hard to fit in. That touching bit is balanced out by Marie’s headless body getting loose, grabbing Mick’s fire gun, and hilariously chasing him and Ray around the ship for a while, but it’s still a good connection there. This might not be the Zari we knew, but there’s more to this version than selling perfume and building her social media brand.

That said, she’s still not perfect, and Zari peeks ahead at her own timeline to see that the perfume she is about to launch is a poisonous failure that tanks her business. So she steals Marie’s magic perfume to use instead, but accidentally spills it on herself, creating a mob of zombie-like admirers chasing her around. But she learns a lesson, and hey, name a Legend who hasn’t screwed up the timeline a few times, right?

As for the darker counterpoint to that romp through French history, Constantine is still trying to find a way to help, and stop, Astra. His journey took him back to his old stomping grounds, where he finally comes face to face with his old love — Natalie, Astra’s mother, who is now a ghost (as Constantine apparently botched an attempt to bring her back from the dead at some point in the past). We see Constantine faced with the decisions that led him to this point, as Natalie pushes him to admit he chose magic over her, and well, anyone else. 

Natalie also reveals she has a plan to save her hellion daughter: The Loom of Fate. Turns out our old pal shape-shifting Charlie was actually a loom, and destroyed the mysterious Loom of Fate and scattered the pieces across the multiverse. But, when the multiverse got slammed back together post-Crisis, those pieces apparently became a whole lot easier to reassemble. So, the search is on for the Loom of Fate.

But first there’s a bit of a problem. Astra is tired of Constantine messing up her plans to take control of Hell, so she calls in a favor and has Constantine’s clock cut short. We learn he’s supposed to have 10 more years to live before the lung cancer catches up to him, but his death date is cut to right now, as he collapses and starts coughing up blood in Gary and Charlie’s arms.

As comic fans surely know, Constantine vs. lung cancer is a classic story, and it seems we’ll actually be getting a version of that on the small screen here.

Next week: Genghis Khan is back and looking to take over the world.