I Watch TV: Legends Of Tomorrow

Legends Of Tomorrow

Legends is over now, so I guess we can sum up. They gathered up a bunch of secondary superheroes and villains from Arrow and The Flash, put them on a time traveling ship and kept making zanier and wackier stories until they hit the sweet spot, a bunch of time-jumping idiots redeeming villains and then creating new ones, in the most mix-and-match so-stupid-it’s-kind-of-cool adventures on television.

I liked it.

This last season changed the formula a bit. At the end of last season, after Sarah and Eva got married in 1920s Texas, their timeship was destroyed. The first few episodes involved the crew trying to catch up with the inventor of time travel, to allow them to take his time machine and get home.

It goes wrong.

The Legends, as a team, are at their best taking villains and making them into, well, not heroes, but more Legends. This has the unfortunate result of grinding off the sharp edges of some characters, making them grumpy or even goofy. The good news is that at that point they often leave the team, leaving space for more. Perhaps interestingly, after Astra tries to use magic to repair their wrecked ship, the spell she uses is based on one for repairing people, so Gideon the AI, is incarnated as a naïve, know-it-all woman (again – the voice actress has occasionally been physical in alternate timelines, dreams and within the computer system). She starts off cute and foolish, becomes hardened by circumstance, and finally has to face down her most dangerous enemy – her previous self, before she learned humanity from the Legends.

Then she has to do it again, two or three more times.

This isn’t a good entry point.  There’s a few good setpieces – the evil robot Legends were fun, and also creepy. A classic Legends Of Tomorrow villain stunt episode.

And really setpiece stunts were what the show had that differentiated it from the other Arrow-verse superhero shows. The Flash does found family, if anything better. Both Supergirl and Batwoman have queer romance. Supergirl strange aliens. The Flash time travel and problem solving. Batwoman stunts and fights. Sure Legends had time travel to historical periods. It’s things like Sarah Lance being seduced by the Queen of France, college-age Obama being attacked by Gorilla Grodd, and messing with the timeline so they end up being puppets when John Constantine tries to save his lover, that’s where Legends excelled.

The inter-team conflicts were messier than most too.

Watch This: If you’re looking for more Legends, this is it, the last of it
Don’t Watch This: You don’t care about weirdos spending half of the season wandering around 1920s America fighting a robot J Edgar Hoover