DC’s Legends of Tomorrow season 5 episode 4 review: Constantine takes center stage

Matt Ryan delivers a powerhouse performance and reminds us just how great Constantine can be in DC’s Legends of Tomorrow’s “Mortal Khanbat.”

The directorial debut of Legends of Tomorrow main cast member Caity Lotz (White Canary), “Mortal Khanbat,” sends the legends to 1980s China to do battle with Genghis Khan, while Ray and Gary try to save Constantine from a ticking clock after his lung cancer resurfaces.

As a rule, there’s always one Legends of Tomorrow plot that’s significantly less interesting than the other. The more boring plot tends to fall to the ‘B’ team, which has tended to comprise of Constantine, Charlie, Gary, Nora, and Ray this season. However, it’s rare that the ‘B’ story is not only more entertaining than the ‘A’ plotline, but also more emotional as well. Thanks to an impassioned performance from Matt Ryan, the ‘B’ plot of “Mortal Khanbat” greatly eclipses the Genghis Khan antics, and makes for one of the best subplots ever featured in a Legends episode.

Picking up where last week’s cliffhanger left off, Constantine is rushed back onto the waverider coughing up blood — where it’s revealed that he has an extreme form of terminal lung cancer. True to form, Constantine’s first instinct is to light up a cigarette, because hey, he’s dying anyway, but Ray and Gary quickly shut that down.

Instead, the trio return to Constantine’s home, where they spend the episode struggling to find a way to combat Constantine’s sudden death sentence while also grappling with the fact that in a number of hours, he may be lost forever.

Other than when he was introduced as a regular back in season 4, Constantine has tended to take more of a backseat role, but “Mortal Khanbat” was a welcome change by putting him (and Matt Ryan) front and center. Thanks to some deft direction from Lotz, the Constantine plot of the episode feels like it’s ripped straight out of an episode of the short-lived NBC series of the same name. It’s gritty, it’s dark, it’s brutal, and it’s emotional.

Legends often has trouble being emotional without coming off as hokey, but “Mortal Khanbat” strikes the perfect balance here. By peppering Constantine’s story with enough mythological and demonic elements to keep the sci-fi side of the show pacified, it’s able to focus on the performances from Matt Ryan and Brandon Routh, both of whom deliver raw emotion and elevate the caliber far beyond typical CW fare.

It feels like such a departure in tone from what Legends typically does, but it works in spades here because the material is strong enough to support the drastic change. Every element works — the direction, the dialogue, the performances — even the briefest of appearances from Nora are sold to perfection and help raise the tension in the story, resulting in a climax that feels so well set up it’s like something out of a feature film and not a 45-minute television episode.

With the Constantine plot being so stellar, however, it makes the Genghis Khan ‘A’ plot feel stunningly shallow and boring. There is virtually no urgency, and it’s difficult to even remember why the Legends need to stop him, other than the catch-all explanation of “he’s evil and he came back from the dead.” Although it was great to see Behrad get a larger role, the sudden romance with Charlie feels like it came out of nowhere. Though Maisie Richardson-Sellers and Shayan Sobhian do have chemistry, it feels oddly out of character for Behrad to suddenly be gloomy and infatuated all episode when he’s always been the cheery, mellow stoner of the group.

Ava also falls flat (yet again), and though we were hopeful after last weeks’ episode, it seems like unless she’s the center of the episode, she falls flat as a character, which is unfortunate given her status as the de-facto leader in Sara’s absence. On the subject of Sara being gone, it seems as if her mysterious lack of screen time will change heading into next week’s episode, so hopefully, that will rectify the lackings in Ava’s story as a leader.

In the end, although the ‘A’ team struggled to keep things interesting, Matt Ryan’s stellar performance and Caity Lotz’s direction make the ‘B’ plot of “Mortal Khanbat” one of the best narratives to come out of the show in a long time.

What did you think of “Mortal Khanbat”? Who’s your favorite legend? Sound off in the comments below.