Following the explosive victory of Season 5’s finale, Season 6 of Legends of Tomorrow picks up on the day-after hangover in 1977 London. Ava Sharpe (Jes Macallen) may awaken with her head in the toilet, but her girlfriend Sara Lance (Caity Lotz) finds herself mid-cryogenic freeze inside an alien containment pod.

“Ground Control to Sara Lance” contains the typical Legends charm and self-aware humor, but contains a sober emotional through-line as Ava (and the team) search for the missing captain. Not least because the Super 8 footage that shows Sara’s hover-beam abduction – courtesy of Ziggy Stardust himself, David Bowie, who also sings about the “Space Girl” – also shows Sara excited to propose to Ava.

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Before this bittersweet “twist,” however, the opening minutes of “Ground Control to Sara Lance” are a relaxed reintroduction to Legends Season 6 roster and status. Mick Rory (Dominic Purcell) did not rage out with the others (he’s more a metalhead anyway), having taken his teenage daughter home early. Mick dusts off Ava and finds John Constantine (Matt Ryan) and Zari (Tali Ashe) in a hotel room after a “strictly casual” hook-up. They then all save the newly-mortal Astra (Olivia Swann) from a shady poker game, and pick up chill stoner-bro Behrad (Shayan Sobhian), who’s chatting to a Buckingham Palace Beefeater. Finally, they find Nate Heywood (Nick Zano) chatting to Bowie about this time-displaced troubles with Zari (“1.0, not you” he tells the current Zari), which is where the gathered group learns of Sara’s abduction and prospective proposal.

Faced with this news, Ava reverts to her type-A bureaucratic personality to find the “pre-found” Sara, giving everyone folders of her agenda. Of course, the Legends go about their own plans instead, which – in a brilliant bit of Legends’ self-aware humor – Ava accurately predicts on her checklist, including “Let any romances run their course” and “Let Rory drink until he cooperates.” Jes Macallan is a highlight of the episode, allowing Ava’s fussy bewilderment to be funny, but not so broad it loses sight of her genuine emotional engagement, which is especially effective in the episode’s closing moments. Nick Zano’s Nate has the least to do at Ava’s side, but his easy chemistry and loose reactions (including locking his mouth when bringing up Sara’s proposal) nicely gels “Ground Control to Sara Lance” together.

Ava and Nate’s plan A is contacting the DEO from Supergirl, only to discover it was recently destroyed on that show. Instead, Behrad and Mick track down the flimsy lead of a woman who claims to have had alien technology implanted in her head, Behrad’s chilled optimism contrasting Mick’s gruff nihilism about how “the universe exists for one reason. To kill you.” While trespassing on her junk yard, the two are kidnapped by the paranoid “Spooner” (Lisseth Chavez), who believe the Legends are aliens who have to come to abduct her again.

In fairness, they kind of do, as Ava tracks Spooner down, tranquilizes her, and takes her aboard the Waverider, promising to remove the implanted alien-tech if she helps locate Sara. Spooner’s introduction is somewhat clumsy, being found randomly by Behrad and alternating between tightly-wound paranoia and relatively relaxed cowgirl. Spooner’s personality mostly seems dictated by the scene she’s in, although this will likely change as Season 6 develops.

The other group is made of Astra, Zari, and Constantine, as the Liverpudlian warlock tries to use his soul-linkage with Sara to locate her. Constantine says he’s an “astrologer, not astronomer,” but Astra uses her knowledge from Hell to remind him of Aleister Crowley, a real-life British occultist who claimed in The Book of the Law that extra-terrestrials taught him magic. Constantine claims Crowley – who he’s encountered in the past – was a “kook,” but searches for his book in his home, leaving to the room of Gary Green (Adam Tsekhman), containing both the book and an open alien sac.

During all this, Sara freed herself from the pod and has been skulking around the spaceship, also freeing the beefy but dull-headed Spartacus of Roman History from another pod. These two give “Ground Control to Sara Lance” its action pieces, as they fend off other alien captives and Sara’s comic exasperation at Spartacus’ headstrong antics. “Being an Avenger is stupid,” she tells him, “the goal is to prevent death. I am a Preventer.” Her words are wasted, though, as Spartacus charges at the alien leader only to be caught and swallowed directly into its stomach. Sara does manage to isolate the second-in-command, only for it to gingery pulls out its (image-inducing) glasses, revealing itself to be Gary, who’s been an alien in disguise the entire time.

Gary being an alien to capture the “quintessential human” (i.e., Sara) is a major retcon, which doesn’t quite match up. Gary’s been through many revamps across Legends of Tomorrow; working beneath Ava in the Time Bureau, having his nipple bitten off by a Unicorn, nearly turning evil after the Legends undermine him, and being Constantine’s magical apprentice. It seems his extra-terrestrial nature would have come up, especially since he’s been shown without his glasses, which apparently mask his shrimp-like alien form.

But Legends of Tomorrow has never been a stickler for “continuity,” and it can be hand-waved off through Crisis on Infinite Earths meddling with the multiverse. Plus, Gary provides Sara a solid counterpart in outer space to bounce off of, including comedic beats where Gary confuses Sara’s questions about the space “ship” with the “ship” of her and Ava. Together, Sara and Gary plan to create a wormhole back to Earth, although Sara gets re-captured while Gary’s at the controls

Back aboard the Waverider, the other Legends combine resources so Constantine can astral project Spooner onto Gary (having churned his alien-sac into a green smoothie) to try and locate Sara. The spell nearly kills him, though, and Zari deactivates it, but not before Ava manages to contact Sara and accept her marriage proposal. This gives Sara the extra push to escape her frozen pod, and push the alien leader and other containment pods out of the ship, and into the open wormhole, which closes before she and Gary can reach it.

This sets up the rest of Season 6, with aliens being scattered along the timestream, but Ava can’t help but smile. “The only person who could cause this much mayhem is Sara,” she explains “which means she’s alive.” Few other shows are as chaotic as Legends of Tomorrow. And while “Ground Control to Sara Lance” is less outlandishly inventive than Season 5’s premiere “Meet the Legends,” and has a few bumps of its own, Legends of Tomorrow brings the same insuppressible charm and glee from its return.

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