Legends of Tomorrow


Dan

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I can't decide if this was the show's best episode or one of their weakest. Pros include the first time I really felt each member of the team had equal to do.

The Heatwave twist was legitimate and his acting was great. His scenes with Snart were the best in the show. I also thought the final fight was pretty good.

But man...this show has pretty much ruined Kendra as a character for me. Beyond Renee Ciara's weak acting, I just found her entirely unlikable throughout. If the show focused more on her POV instead of Ray's we could've gotten a better balance. But between the really bad handling of the whole "screw two years, now we can go back to the future!/actually I still like you I just refused to make that clear" she's officially the worst character in the show for me.

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I didn't think it was as bad as the last couple, but a lot of the show's problems were still on display. "Ray and Kendra's relationship blossoms while stranded in the past for two years" and "Rick is molded into Chronos" could have been B-plots for entire episodes, but instead they're sped through and crammed into the same one. And the latter definitely needed more, because here's the thing: Chronos sucks, has always sucked. It doesn't do Rory any favors to retroactively be made into the guy that elicits a sigh whenever he shows up. There's a lot of this show's knack for the writers pulling whatever they need out of their asses, uninterested in the show having any kind of internal logic. Going up against the League of Assassins? Rip Hunter did his graduate thesis (what the fuck) on them. Snart loses a hand? We can just grow him a new one, nevermind the times the crew's needed something from the past to fix the damn time-travelling spaceship.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I don't know how much longer I can keep watching this show. It's at the point where it feels like a chore. It just insists on not giving any of the actors much to do, and the plots are so dumb. What an imaginary conflict (and rip-off of the Wally plot earlier this season in Flash) the whole Ray "I have a son" thing was that lasted for all of ten minutes. How uninvited and mishandled were each and every one of Kendra's flashbacks were, only to do nothing to stem her relationship with Ray even though she should feel deeply conflicted. How thoroughly unconvincing of an actress Ciara Renee has become in relying on the same face at any given situation? What's the point of having a "kill baby Hitler" plot if interfering in the timeline yet adding nothing of consequence except to yet again alert Savage of their whereabouts? At this point Rip should just go back in time and stop himself from stealing Gideon and gathering the team in the first place. Why does the team all dress in designer clothes when there's no one for them to show off to since they live on a ship? Ok admittedly that's a CW thing, but still...

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It's just such a sloppy and lazy show: Professor Stein on the moral high ground about killing future Hitler when he drugged and kidnapped Jax; the guards dressed in black and wearing red arm bands to drive home the Hitler parallel, but they can't be bothered to put a symbol on the arm band; the season long swiping from Age of Ultron across all the shows continues with the Atom robots; the episode ending with Rory warning of the coming threat of...The Hunters. 

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By this point I feel the show should have found its feet and worked for the benefit of its best aspects. It doesn't even operate logically. Cold should've just killed chibi-Degaton because that's exactly in his character to do so. Kendra's memories of Carter should have her ripped apart. Stein and Jax should regularly be seen more as a double act since they have to be together to form Firestorm. This is basic stuff that's just not hitting the brainwaves of the writers.

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  • 1 month later...

A 30 second recap of the finale.

Martin Stein: I've been against murder all season, but FUCK IT, let's kill THREE Vandal Savages!

Rip Hunter: I'm going to sacrifice myself by taking a bomb into the sun so I can be reunited with my dead wife and son, which would actually be a fitting resolution to my selfish ass character. ...Wait, shit, I want to live!

Some Jackass With a Hood: I'm Rex Tyler...I'm a member of the Justice Society of America. Did you hear that, nerds? The Justice Society of America. After you're done creaming your pants, don't forget to watch the next season of this garbage show just because we mentioned the Justice Society of America!

The last time I watched a show this poorly put together and written, it was Smallville Season 10. 

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Took a five or six week break from the series because...GAWD. But all caught up and just finished the finale.

I was telling Chris that I think watching one after another makes the show easier to get through. Some moments in the episodes I moderately enjoyed, like the Giant-Atom/Robot fight. The show finally began doing things it should have done since day one like consistently keep Stein and Jax together and show Kendra being a good fighter. I super appreciated the exit of the Hawks at the end. But much of it was WAY too little too late.

I know it does little good to complain about temporal consistency in a time travel show, but way too much makes no sense. How does destroying the Occulus and the Time Masters themselves not completely fuck up all of space and time? The whole thing about the Time Masters being in league with Savage and all of the teams' actions being pre-dictated made way too little sense for the surprise to even be briefly effective. And I don't worry about Snart being dead because it's a time travel show and I didn't hate how he went out. The show tried to weaken Cold's persona, but his Snarty-snark kept him above water for the most part. I actually think the penultimate episode had great dialogue from both him and Heatwave. Then again, there was the whole "HEATWAVE RESISTS MIND CONTROL BECAUSE OF LURRRVE"

Chris is right, Rip should have died and been brought back due to time travel next season. A touching scene ruined with such powerful incompetence that it's astonishing. Also, a major thing that kept happening in the back half of the show was the wantonly violent murder that they kept doing with zero dialogue addressing it. In the Wild West Atom bursts through a guy with blood everywhere, and no one sees or questions this. The team annihilates a woman for simply doing her job at the end of the day. And though it was always the plan to kill Savage, the way in which it was carried out was hilariously over-the-top, with Roury's burning him to death particularly brutal. I'm not against the team killing, but the tone of the show and the bathetic cries of keeping morality at a centered level from Atom and Stein makes these killings all the more stunning and completely against the metric of characterization displayed previously. It's endemic of the crappy-ass writing that afflicted this series from the start. Way too much doubling back on previously established rules, way too many deus ex machinas, way too many bullcrap twists that never made any sense.

The cast was also very hit/miss. I've said it before, but a big reason the Flash works as well as it does is that the actors are all fully capable of working with the material they're given, even if the writing has an off day. I don't really notice any bad episodes because the acting is always on point. This show only had a small handful of capable actors, the rest were drowning throughout. Arthur Darvill, Victor Garber, Wentworth Miller and Dominic Purcell are all reliable stalwarts. I'd put Brandon Routh right up there because although Ray's character isn't as interestingly portrayed as theirs, he still does perfectly fine work. Caity Lotz had no effect on me at the start, but by the end I could see her appeal. The last episode to me was her best performance in learning about Laurel. Franz Drameh annoyed the crap out of me for the first bulk of the show, but I got into him a bit better by the end, and that's due to the writers making him slightly more sympathetic. He was good in the episode with his father.

But man...Ciara Renee was so bad throughout this show it almost breaks my heart. She was flailing throughout and actively ruined scenes she was in. In fairness to her the character was given the show's biggest albatross in the terrible past-lives subplot. But even in scenes beyond that she never had chemistry with anyone. You could see Brandon Routh go for broke in their scenes together, and she always delivers that same, vacant, "I don't know how to emote" look on her face that Tom Welling made into an art-form for ten years on Smallville. Other times she was meant to be given this almost sardonic sense of humor that never felt right in the scene. One of the worst was when Ray was rightfully shitting bricks at the notion of being killed in the past as a baby. The writers make Kendra try to play this off as goofy, and Renee's condescending reaction is utterly insufferable.

The show never got into the team becoming a team. Say what you will about the Avengers films, but there's been a few scenes with all of them together having a group discussion establishing character interaction. This show never thought to do that, having Carter always relate everything he was told to him having a past life, because he has no character and no personality. What does the team think about Jax, or Firestorm for that matter? How do Kendra and Sara feel about the other dying and coming back to life? What are Stein's thoughts on Sara? The simplest things could have made this show character-driven, but the show really really thought it would write itself by having a wacky concept, Arthur Darvill and random C-Listers from the DCW shows. It was thoroughly inept from beginning to end.

Edited by Donomark
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So I'm deeply disappointed in this show. I love the idea of a team of B- and C-listers given the opportunity to have a showcase. However, the cast was way too big, some of the actors were not that great, and the actual superheroics tended to be fairly bland and awful. This show featured some of my favorite lower-tier DC heroes (the Atom, Firestorm, the Hawks) and managed to waste every one of them. The less said about Hawkgirl the better; Donovan was spot on when he bemoaned the actress' lack of screen presence. The others were really frustrating, though; Stein and Jax were fairly fun and likeable for the most part (and Stein, at least, felt somewhat well-fleshed out), but Firestorm was a complete letdown, when he was allowed to appear at all. Every couple of years comics tries to re-do Peter Parker, and Firestorm is probably my favorite one of those characters (which doesn't surprise when his creator was the definitive Spider-Man writer for over a decade), but here he's just a low-rent Human Torch who barely ever gets to actually use his powers. On a similar note, Ray Palmer is goofy, awkward, and funny, but the Atom is a bargain basement Iron Man who never actually shrinks, ever. Arthur Darvill was misused disgracefully. Vandal Savage was terrible; his actor couldn't be much worse, and the character is boring and bland. The cast is really, really likeable for the most part, and the show definitely had its moments, but the wasted opportunity here was really disheartening. I didn't watch a lot of the back half of the season, and I'm not sure I'll come back in the fall.

"My name is Rex Tyler! I'm a member of the Justice Society of America!"

DAN'S RESOLVE: ... Motherfucker.

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In the best possible way. Season 1 was very straight-faced and mopey and whatnot. Then they realized this is a show about a bunch of B- and C-list superheroes on a time-travelling spaceship, and it turned into the kind of show where they go to the American Civil War to find out that Confederate soldiers are rising from the graves as zombies and holy shit they ate Ulysses S. Grant.

I mean, i have to assume they're on the set of a 30s serial or something similar there, but holy crap. B'Wana Beast.

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