Legends of Tomorrow Midseason Finale Reveals Shocking New Villains

The first half of DC's Legends of Tomorrow season seven has been one that lacked a clear "big bad," but in the midseason finale last night, it became clear that won't last. In the last three episodes, the series has made it clear exactly what happened at the end of last season, and who has been chasing the team down...and at the end of last night's episode, "A Woman's Place is in the War Effort," the show's villain game really upped the ante. That's because in the closing moments of the episode, the Legends finally got their evil twins.

Evil doppelgangers of the heroes are a superhero staple. The Flash has the Revese-Flash, Arrow has the Dark Archer/Merlyn, and the trope has informed the first installment in a handful of Marvel movies (Iron Man, Ant-Man, Captain America: The First Avenger). Up to this point, the Legends had not really had that. The show's first season flirted with it, since they were squaring off against the Time Masters, but there was never a 1:1 "evil" version.

Now, like Bill and Ted in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, the Legends are facing evil robot versions of themselves. 

In case you missed it, at the end of last season, the Waverider was destroyed, and the team had spent five episodes trapped in Texas in 1925. Eventually, the audience (and later the characters) learned that the ship had been destroyed by Bishop, a younger version of last season's villain, who believed he was avenging himself after the Legends abducted and mind-wiped him. Once he learned that the only reason they did it, was to give him a chance to alter his destiny and save himself from going evil, he came around, and abandoned his teammate -- a corrupted version of the Waverider's Gideon AI -- to go help the heroes.

Last night, all that came to a head. The team, now pursued by an evil Gideon and possessing a steampunk time machine that lacks defensive capabilities or precise steering, learned that the worst thing they can do is change history, because it alerts the Gideon AI to the anachronism, and she can deploy someone after them. Of course, up to this point, Gideon's lackeys had basically been robot versions of characters the Legends encountered along the way, like J. Edgar Hoover or Bishop. The robots were designed to enter the timeline and carry out tasks originally performed by their doppelgangers, keeping the timeline intact in spite of the Legends' interference.

So in the closing moments of the episode, after Astra had made headlines by helping to integrate a factory, Gideon's forces descended on the Legends. With Bishop hanging back to sacrifice himself and buy them time, the team escaped...leaving the audience to see that Gideon's new strike force is evil versions of the Legends themselves. And in case there was any doubt that they were robots, rather than straight-up clones or versions from an alternate timeline, the evil versions of Zari and Spooner appeared to have died, only to be up and moving again in the next scene for the big reveal of the full "Evil Legends" team.

Fans will have to wait until January to see how the Legends-versus-Legends season plays out. Are you excited to see what happens once the team figures out they're fighting their robot doppelgangers? Let us know in the comments or hit up @russburlingame on Twitter to talk all things Arrowverse.