The team is kinda famous, evil souls are on the loose in Legends’ wild season premiere

After the events of last season, which saw the Legends face off with magical creatures at an amusement part, the ragtag group of superheroes had a bit of trouble keeping themselves off the radar. So now, they’re kinda famous. At least for a minute.

Spoilers ahead for “Meet the Legends,” the latest episode of The CW’s Legends of Tomorrow, which aired Tuesday, January 21, 2020.

Turns out a lot has happened since the curtain fell last season. The Time Bureau has been shut down by Congress, so now the Legends really are the only thing standing between the world and a time catastrophe. With the Bureau defunct, Ava has relocated to the ship and is essentially now a bona fide legend. There’s also a new face on board, only teased in last season’s finale: Behrad, who replaced Zari on the crew when time was rewritten. As we pick up the action here, the Legends are still none the wiser (and neither is Behrad), thinking the super-chill ship technician and totem bearer has been there all along.

Part of the story is told through the lens of a documentary crew tasked with following the Legends for a film digging into these new fan favorite heroes, hired by Ava to try and provide some public support and transparency to keep Congress from also shutting down the Legends. It’s a great gimmick to remind fans who these characters are and get new viewers up to speed quickly. Well done. The only problem is that, fresh off Oliver’s death in Crisis, Sara is in no mood to play nice for the camera. Despite the wild and silly antics that make this series so fun, we really do get to dig into Sara’s mourning over Oliver’s sacrifice. She gets some solemn moments to process it, and instead of burying it down, she wants to talk through it with her friends. It’s amazing how far this character has come over the years.

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The crew gets nailed with a time quake that leads them to Russia circa 1917, where Rasputin has come back to life to exact revenge and make a move to take over the country for himself. So the team heads in, with every member pretty much taking their own approach to solving the problem, from forged love letters to sniper rifles, to a faux documentary on Rasputin himself. It’s here Nate starts to get an inkling that Zari is missing, as Rasputin hypnotizes him and he can sense someone is missing. That thread gets picked up later as Gideon is working though the “bug” created when they accidentally rewrote time and erased Zari. There he finds a hologram message she left him, urging him to try and find her… wherever she’s gone into the time stream.

The Rasputin story is a fun one, and classic Legends. They play with a historical period, put a fun twist on it, and we even get the weirdest kill yet as they can’t figure out how to actually kill the reanimated Rasputin. So Sara tosses a shrunken Ray in his Atom suit in Rasputin’s mouth and has Ray embiggen from inside him — literally exploding him into goo. Yeah, it was the old Ant-Man/Thanos theory brought to bloody, bloody life. But even that goo can’t be killed, so they kept it all in separate jars to prevent him from reanimating.

Along the way Constantine (with his new apprentice Gary) learns about Astra’s power play for Hell last season when she released the worst of the worst souls back upon the world. It explains Rasputin’s appearance, and in an effort to thwart more releases, Constantine heads back to Hell itself to try and work the problem.

Rory’s alter ego as a romance writer also plays a key role this week, and even serves to clear a part-time crew member off the Waverider. Mona, the werewolf from last season, has stuck around with the crew to serve as Rory’s literary agent. But Rory realizes all that writing is getting in the way of his true passion (you know, stealing stuff), so he passes the mantle of Rebecca Silver down to Mona. She decides she can’t do the job and be on the ship, so Mona heads to the mainland to chase her dreams as a literary giant.

All that fame is short-lived, though, when the crew uses a stage appearance to say all their heroics are fake — telling the world they're actually frauds. Fame over, and the Legends are back to living their lives under the radar. But wait, how will the Legends fund their adventures if Congress does try and pull the plug? We learn Rory couldn’t keep his hands to himself and swiped a priceless artifact from Rasputin’s castle, worth a cool $50 million. That should keep the crew in cereal and beer for a good long time.

Up next: The team heads to Old Hollywood, and hopefully gets a bit closer to bringing Zari back to the world of the living.