Third up in the Arrowverse shows is Legends of Tomorrow. After a rocky first season, the show has found its footing and continues to grow and evolve with each episode. Ex-Black Canary Sara Lance leads a ragtag crew around time trying to right the wrongs… that they created. How did these heroes become legends? Spoiler alert: anything up until 2017’s winter finales is fair game.
LEGENDS OF TOMORROW – Current Season: 3
The first season of LoT was not great. The core “Legends” were fine: White Canary, The Atom, Firestorm, Hawkgirl, (sometimes) Hawkman, Captain Cold, Heat Wave, and Rip Hunter. But that was problem #1 – too many characters. None of them were able to develop properly because there were just too many people on screen at once. Personally I could have done without Captain Cold and Hawkman, and maybe Atom, just because the other characters seemed so much more interesting (and Captain Cold, for me, ran his course on The Flash). I was very much looking forward to seeing Arthur Darvill take his turn behind the wheel of a time machine, after being on Doctor Who as lovable sidekick Rory. Although he’s still on the show in a diminished role, he is still very enjoyable as Rip.
The main antagonist for our Legends was Vandal Savage, a classic from the comics, and his quest to… honestly I don’t remember. They just kept saying he was immortal, which is not an ideal quality for a villain in a show’s first season… The backstory about Savage, Hawkman and Hawkgirl being reincarnated over and over fell flat, since there weren’t really consequences for them; they even killed off poor Hawkman, who was a capable version of the character.
Predictably, the Legends stopped Vandal Savage, and lost a few people along the way. Captain Cold and Hawkgirl (along with a missing Rip Hunter) bounced off the team in season 2, and we welcomed Vixen and Steel. The Arrowverse created a Legion of Doom with Damien Darhk, Malcolm Merlyn, and Eobard Thawne fighting to find and use the Spear of Destiny to alter reality. This led to some fun along the way (the 80’s! Shogun! Jonah Hex! Camelot!), and Vixen and Steel quickly fit well into the team. The overall tone of the show changed during this season to be much more lighthearted (instead of all the death and destruction of season 1), and learned to play with time travel instead of just using it for gloom and doom.
With the Legion defeated and Rip found, the Legends inadvertently broke time, and are currently tasked with fixing their anachronisms while battling a newly resurrected Damien Darhk and a currently unknown enemy named Mallus (voiced by the great John Noble). Rip formed the Time Bureau, an FBI – for time – and has been popping up here and there, along with obviously-an-eventual-love-interest-for-Sara Agent Ava Sharpe. Along the way we met younger versions of the Legends and even an imp named Beebo who temporarily took over Christmas.
What usually doesn’t work with other shows does seem to work for LoT: a somewhat rotating cast. With Firestorm no longer a thing, thanks to Stein’s death, there are 2 vacancies on the WaveRider; I hope they’ll be filled with The Flash’s (underutilized) Wally West, and supernatural sleuth John Constantine. It definitely keeps things interesting when Legends can come and go at any time, and is a fun way to explore new team dynamics like Ray and Nate’s bromance or Amaya and Mick’s friendship.
What hasn’t really been working for me in season 3 is the seemingly disjointed villains/storylines. I’m hoping Darhk, Mallus, and Kuasa come together at some point – hopefully Mallus is pulling all the strings? But overall it’s been an interesting ride for the Legends, and I’m happy to stay aboard the WaveRider for some more jaunts through time, if only to see some more DC classic characters come to life.
MxM
mikexmachina 
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