I’ll be honest. Going into the premieres of the Arrowverse, shows, I didn’t have high expectations that they would do well (as I’ve stated a couple of times over the summer in various posts on this site).
Legends of Tomorrow was the one that would either impress me or disappoint me the most. The Flash had already let me down by letting Iris live through the season finale and Supergirl was going to have to fight an uphill battle to impress me after they seemed to be allowing Kara to wallow in her own misery.
But Legends, now that held some promise.
The season finale did something that I knew was inevitable.
Any theoretical time traveler will tell you that the first law of time travel is to not interfere in your own timeline. By doing so you risk upsetting the space/time continuum, you risk causing yourself to cease to exist, you risk a temporal anomaly that could wreak havoc on time.
And the Legends ended up with what was behind Door Number 3.
The season ends with them in Los Angeles, modern day and time is in shreds. In fact the closing line is “Guys, I think we broke time.”
And they did. By appearing in the same place at the same time as their past selves, they ripped holes in time that let people and things bleed through into times where they didn’t belong.
That’s where we open the season. It only takes about two minutes for me to develop a problem.
While the gap between the finale and the premiere is instantaneous for the Legends, for Rip it has apparently been five years and during that time he created what is known as the Time Bureau and has decided the Legends are obsolete, going as far as to tell them that their services are no longer needed.
Rip, I’m going to need you to get off your high horse for half a second and realize something.
This is just as much, if not more, your fault as it is theirs. You left the Waverider just as much as them. In fact, it was when you came in the same room as your past self that there seemed to be a problem.
So get off your high horse long enough to realize this problem is as much your’s as it is their’s.
Anyways….
The Legends try to assimilate back into normal life. Sara Lance ends up in a retail job, Martin Stein is settling back home with his daughter who’s now pregnant and Jax has gone back to school to get his Masters in Engineering. Ray is working for some app company in Silicon Valley. Amaya has gone back to her own time and Nate is in Central City fighting crime with Team Flash (with being a relative term, he seems to handle smaller things and Wally’s cameo shows that Central City is well taken care of and doesn’t necessarily need another hero). And Mick Rory finally made it to Aruba.
All of them, besides Rory, are miserable.
So when Rory spots Julius Caesar, the team jumps at the chance to help fix their mistake and clean up their mess.
This begins a trend that by the end of Episode 3 was really getting on my nerves (and getting old). The Legends find a case, the Time Bureau tries to tell them what to do, they ignore them, they fight, their fighting actually makes it worse, the Legends fix the issue, and the Time Bureau continues to have absolutely no faith in them.
Rinse and repeat twice and you have episodes 2 and 3.
After the Legends returned Julius Caesar to his own time, he steals Nate’s history book and learns that he will be betrayed by Brutus and Cassius. By knowing what’s happening in his own future, he is able to avoid his fate and manages to take over the world, with his empire existing past what would be the Legends modern day.
The book is retrieved, Caesar’s memory is wiped, and history is restored.
The Legends realize that these “anachronisms” are their fault. By crossing their own timelines and being in the same place twice they virtually shredded time allowing who knows what to go who knows where. This launches us into the season where the team recommits to work together to clean up their own mess.
There’s already hints at our big bad of the season. Rip is heard talking to his assistant (or number 2, I haven’t fully figured out what her purpose is besides her mere presence letting me know that I’m about to be annoyed by a woman who thinks she knows it all and is better than the Legends – whether or not she is is not the point, people with an inflated sense of self worth are generally annoying) that the Legends might be their best bet at stopping something.
Meanwhile, a water assassin (I kid you not, she was summoned out of water and seemed to move like it when not in her humanoid form) is traveling through time, though we’ve only met her once so far.
What these mean for the mid season and later the season finale, only time will tell.
Going into Episode 2, this was an episode that was teased at SDCC. We meet the famous P.T. Barnum who has captured an anachronism, a saber-tooth tiger. He is using that tiger as a feature piece in his circus. What is a seemingly innocent and simple anachronism turns into a much bigger issue due to a series of blunders on the part of the Legends.
There was talk before the season started and it seemed as if this was the Legends taking a turn into more campy territory. Another explanation for it is that people tend to mess up when their actions are continuously judged and they are put under a hypothetical microscope.
They retrieve the tiger, lose the tiger, manage to get Amaya, Ray, Nate, and Jaq captured, free them, capture the tiger again, and help Barnum put on quite a show.
We also learn that Amaya has been having trouble with her powers, an issue that’s causing her to lose control and the animal in her totem to take over. We see it briefly in the premiere as Amaya takes on a group of troops who threaten her village, we see it again in episode 2. It takes Nate to talk her down and that’s when they realize that there’s an issue.
The revelation that she’s having trouble with her powers takes us into Episode 3 where we’re going from the past into the not-so-distant future. The Legends intercept a distress signal from a Time Bureau agent named Gary and come to the year 2048. The water assassin who was summoned in the previous episode, tried to intercept a prison transport vehicle but when she killed the driver, the prisoner used the distraction to escape.
We meet Zari. Her presence was mentioned at SDCC as well (if not there then in an article after) since she’s the newest member of the team. Zari has a rap sheet a mile long, various petty crimes, and religion (which is apparently outlawed by that time, along with metahumans). She tricks the Legends into helping her retrieve an amulet that was her brothers. While there, they stage a prison break because ARGUS of the future is corrupt and is running tests on metahumans.
Time is restored and Zari is given the choice of staying in her time and running from ARGUS the rest of her life or going with the Legends team.
Amaya pushes for her to join, the amulet she now wears is a totem, much like the necklace that Amaya wears. She thinks that destiny has brought them together, at least for a time, through these amulets.
My biggest issue with these first three episodes was that they seemed repetitive in form and structure. All three started with time going wonky because of an anachronism, the Legends trying to fix it, the Time Bureau telling them no, they can handle it and that the Legends have “helped” enough, then the Legends end up fixing it everywhere all the while trading insults with the Time Bureau.
By the end up episode 3, I was tired of it. I wanted to break up the monotony with what’s made Legends fun over the years.
Going into episode 4, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I’m going to touch on that in my next post.
Until then…
Latest posts by Mary Helen Norris (see all)
- The Hybrid Fanzine Celebrates The Twelfth Doctor - October 12, 2018
- The Thirteenth Doctor Arrives In “The Woman Who Fell To Earth” - October 9, 2018
- Manifest Lands With A Spectacular Pilot - September 28, 2018