Legends isn’t trying to build a better mousetrap here, but you know what? I don’t really care; this show is entertaining as hell. “Chemistry,” surprisingly, isn’t a Martin-heavy episode; rather, it takes the hour to spend some time fleshing out the show’s supporting cast, and is well-served for doing so.
Any undercover cop show worth its salt will have the Russian Mob Episode, because Eastern Promises was a cool movie, and “Chemistry” is this show’s entry. A former chemist for the Russian military is kidnapped in Bakersfield, and threatened not only with this death but with his family’s if he doesn’t make a nerve gas called VX (obviously it’s called VX, which means so much less than nothing). For the record, living in Russia is better than living in Bakersfield.
Well, it’s up to team Legends to get the guy and his family out alive, and shockingly the operation isn’t spearheaded by Martin, but rather by Troy Buchanan, who already has a CI in the Chechen mob. In fact, Martin spends most of the operation sitting at a bar (I want his job) while Crystal and Troy play nice with the mobsters. Then bullets start flying and poor Troy is down for the count. RIP, buddy, you were too beautiful for this world. Also, you were a character on Legends, which apparently aims to kill of a member of Martin’s support staff every single episode. If I were Maggie I’d be emailing resumes out like crazy.
With Troy out of the picture, it’s up to Martin (duh) to go undercover, this time as Dante, a British arms dealer who Yates distractingly calls a “lord of war.” We get it, that was a movie, but I’m guessing this show doesn’t remember the part where Nicolas Cage says that “lord of war” is the incorrect term. Also, Troy joked that “cocaine is a hell of a drug” (which it is, it’s awesome, you gotta try it, kids at home), which is a reference that’s about ten years too late to make.
The rest of the episode is taken up by Martin’s quest to get some answers about the pilot’s mysterious hooded black man. I know that’s a lazy, reductive way to describe him, but we don’t find out until this episode that his name is Robert Maccone (I think that’s his last name; Sean Bean’s accent made it kind of hard to tell, and IMDb has the actor, Billy Brown, listed as playing “Stranger”). Martin makes what could be an enemy (but who will certainly be a reluctant ally) in Morris Chestnut’s transportation detective Tony Rice, who by the end of “Chemistry” is following Martin with a surveillance team. Martin is also told by Yates not to tell anyone else about his encounter with Maccone, which is a pretty good indicator that there’s a lot more to this story.
(Also, the book that Martin was given was The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I’ve never read it, and I’m not going to let TNT’s primitime lineup get me to read some 200-year-old Russian doorstop.)
“Chemistry” was a pretty by-the-numbers episode for a pretty by-the-numbers show. I liked that they set up a part two, which presumably will involve Martin’s arms dealer character, because when the 60-minute mark was approaching I found myself thinking “Man, they’re running out of time for the shootout.” So it’s good that Legends, at the very least’s, respects its audience’s attention span. It just doesn’t respect its characters’ lives.
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