Let's Talk About Legends of Tomorrow

captclazorus

Spoiler Alert for CW's "DC's Legends of Tomorrow"


A little emotional depth is good and all right, but that really seems to be what runs this show. We have a tone of characters available to make potential character interactions, but lets face it, what this show should be about Hawkman, Hawkgirl, and Rip Hunter. I love this show, but it needed so much work.
Take their villain, Vandal Savage. He may debatably have the most incredible story of any villain in DC history because he has lived through ages of history. He never gets to explain himself. We never get to see just what it is that makes him who he is. We know he has a deep unrequited love for Chay-Ara that surfaces and exhibits itself as hatred, but that alone does not give us the mental image of who he is. He is a fantastic villain! In this version, he has been alive four thousand years, living through and influencing all of the major events in known history! And then, finally, in 2166 he lives to finally see his dreams of conquest realized. He lives to make something of himself, where all of his other aspirations, either in love or in war, fell flat. Most of this is just an inference. Like I said, he is a very flat character on the show. Now, he comes to be in league with the Time Masters, who stand outside of time, yet are evidently arising from the 22nd century. What this means is that he must, for the Time Masters, kill Miranda and Jonas Hunter, which will give Rip the inspiration he needs to want to stop Savage. This drives him back in time to recruit the Hawkcouple in the year 2016, along with several other characters, some of whom will prove to useful, others of whom who prove to cause more problems, either by wrecking the timeline or causing uncomfortable love triangles.
Yet the character Savage is so weak here. Either in four thousand years, he has never learned to fight worth a darn, or he has relied on the fact he can't be killed by normal folk to survive. I love the idea of returning the world, basically restarting time in 1700 BC by causing a huge temporal paradox by destroying the world "simultaneously" in three different points in history. (next, let's talk about the temporal mechanics of the show)
The penultimate episode of the season had a good means of wrapping it up and giving some plausibility as to why seven superheros can go back in time and create a total mess without ruining the universe: the Time Masters use the Oculus to counteract it. But the fact still remains, Savage is the great manipulator of history, and they can't do any better with him than the death they gave him? Really? They could have done a much better job of tying things together and fleshing out the villains as well as the heroes. I love this show, but I really wish I had been in charge of producing its material.

daveyny

I find the show to be just OK.
It was annoying as hell to constantly hear the whining about Rips' dead family, and many of the episodes made the characters seem really, REALLY Stupid at times.
I blame the writers for not having a clue as to how to write consistently intelligent characters.
I also hated that 90% of the shows ended with the characters Losing in some fashion, it was too damn depressing for my tastes.

I really hope they drop the Randall Savage storyline for the second season, I'm tired of that character as well.

jonsills

Let's not talk about the temporal mechanics of the show. Because honestly, it made the Temporal Cold War look coherent. It's a fun show loosely based on DC comics, but like many such, if you look too hard at the underpinnings you'll lose the fun as the whole thing collapses like an ice-cream cake on a summer day.