Legends S1-2
Dec. 7th, 2020 08:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishGreg Berlanti et al, Legends of Tomorrow (S1-S2)
I got interested in Legends of Tomorrow when I saw the first trailer. (Contains no spoilers; in fact, contains very little footage from the actual series. Apparently it was shot entirely as a promo reel during an existing Flash shoot.) I was mostly interested because I'd just finished watching Alias and enjoying the heck out of Victor Garber's Jack Bristow, and because I'd heard that DC's TV shows were pretty good. Then life happened and I never actually watched the show.
But it kept getting more seasons, and it kept looking like goofy time-travel fun. And there's a plague on so I figured, what the hey.
I've now blasted through the first two seasons in, mm, about a month? Sounds about right, I picked it up right after Kipo's mildly disappointing third and final season. (Kipo S3, incidentally, is still worth watching, and still relentlessly upbeat which is a Good Thing these days. But the third season shifted from "Kipo and company explore this awesome world" to "Kipo vs the Big Bad," which doesn't fit nearly so well with the emotional tone they're trying to hit.)
Spoilers follow.
So, Legends S1. It feels a bit rough in places: the getting-the-band-together first episode in particular has a lot of the same feel of an RPG campaign where the GM is trying to come up with reasons for the PCs to work together dammit and the players are mostly on board with this but occasionally feel the need to assert "but it's not what my CHARACTER would do." But it does come together, and it works. Mostly. Enough.
The redoubtable Mari Ness has an article about why you should read Narnia in pub order, a subject dear to my heart. This is relevant because Mari mentions that for the most part she doesn't much care what order you watch things in with three exceptions: Narnia (obviously), Blackadder (which I have seen only bits of)... and Legends of Tomorrow, where you should skip the first season until you're invested in the characters.
I can't really argue with this. The thing about S1 ... there's nothing wrong with it, as such, it's just... okay. It is the Hawkgirl vs Vandal Savage show, and Savage is just not that great a villain. It also has a lot of Arthur "Rory" Darvill's Rip Hunter, and Darvill frequently does not quite make Rip as impressive as he wants to be.
(Another reason to skip S1: for S2 the writers changed how time works. In S1 several of the Legends try to alter their own histories, to avert various tragedies... and it doesn't work. "Time," Rip says over and over again, "wants to happen." Which is a great line in a show that's ultimately about the inevitability of history. Then S2 comes along and there are "time aberrations" all over the place. One could argue that this is a result of the destruction of the Time Masters... but no one does.)
Personally I have no regrets about starting with S1: the doomed Hawkgirl/Ray Palmer romance had a few moments of genuine pathos. Mick Rory as Chronos the intertemporal bounty hunter worked for me. I especially enjoyed Wentworth Miller's Leonard Snart and his transformation from criminal to an actual hero. But S1 is trying really hard to be a Serious Action-y Show, and it just doesn't fit the characters well at all.
I'm glad I stuck with it, because S2 starts to become the wild and wacky time-travel show it wants to be. Hawkman and Hawkgirl are gone, and they're hardly missed (Snart, though :( ). In their place are Nate, an earnest young historian who gives Ray someone to banter with, and Amaya, a ... love interest for Nate. Can't win 'em all. Rip is mostly absent, and Sara Lance / White Canary takes over as Captain. Caity Lotz does a great job with the meatier role, and Darvill in general does a much better job when he's onscreen.
The villains run circles around S1's overly-oily Vandal Savage. Villains, plural: assassins (and Assassins) Damien Darkh and Malcolm Merlyn are joined by "speedster" (evil Flash) Eobard Thawne. (I'm a sucker for speedsters, which probably means I should just watch Flash already.) They're all imported from elsewhere in the Arrowverse. There is a /lot/ of backstory to these villains that I missed, and sort of pieced together from reading summaries of Arrow and Flash. Here, though, they bicker. It's great. My only complaint is that I wish they'd cast Paul Gross as Malcolm instead of geek favourite John Barrowman. Barrowman just doesn't do quietly-menacing well enough for me. A minor complaint.
Halfway through the season there's a "crossover", which necessitated tracking down the corresponding episodes of Arrow and Flash. So that was kind of annoying, and the crossover itself was something of an interruption to the flow of the overall story. Oh well. Comic books gonna comic book.
The S2 plot is mostly goofy. The first half is running around trying to figure out what's going on; the second half is "collect the plot coupons before the Bad Guys do!" Then, as expected, the Bad Guys manage to steal and activate the combined Plot Coupon... and the last two episodes are just fantastic, scrappy heroes fighting against impossible odds with improbable plans and occasionally doing ridiculous things.
I'm told John Constantine shows up in S3. I am excited for this development.
I got interested in Legends of Tomorrow when I saw the first trailer. (Contains no spoilers; in fact, contains very little footage from the actual series. Apparently it was shot entirely as a promo reel during an existing Flash shoot.) I was mostly interested because I'd just finished watching Alias and enjoying the heck out of Victor Garber's Jack Bristow, and because I'd heard that DC's TV shows were pretty good. Then life happened and I never actually watched the show.
But it kept getting more seasons, and it kept looking like goofy time-travel fun. And there's a plague on so I figured, what the hey.
I've now blasted through the first two seasons in, mm, about a month? Sounds about right, I picked it up right after Kipo's mildly disappointing third and final season. (Kipo S3, incidentally, is still worth watching, and still relentlessly upbeat which is a Good Thing these days. But the third season shifted from "Kipo and company explore this awesome world" to "Kipo vs the Big Bad," which doesn't fit nearly so well with the emotional tone they're trying to hit.)
Spoilers follow.
So, Legends S1. It feels a bit rough in places: the getting-the-band-together first episode in particular has a lot of the same feel of an RPG campaign where the GM is trying to come up with reasons for the PCs to work together dammit and the players are mostly on board with this but occasionally feel the need to assert "but it's not what my CHARACTER would do." But it does come together, and it works. Mostly. Enough.
The redoubtable Mari Ness has an article about why you should read Narnia in pub order, a subject dear to my heart. This is relevant because Mari mentions that for the most part she doesn't much care what order you watch things in with three exceptions: Narnia (obviously), Blackadder (which I have seen only bits of)... and Legends of Tomorrow, where you should skip the first season until you're invested in the characters.
I can't really argue with this. The thing about S1 ... there's nothing wrong with it, as such, it's just... okay. It is the Hawkgirl vs Vandal Savage show, and Savage is just not that great a villain. It also has a lot of Arthur "Rory" Darvill's Rip Hunter, and Darvill frequently does not quite make Rip as impressive as he wants to be.
(Another reason to skip S1: for S2 the writers changed how time works. In S1 several of the Legends try to alter their own histories, to avert various tragedies... and it doesn't work. "Time," Rip says over and over again, "wants to happen." Which is a great line in a show that's ultimately about the inevitability of history. Then S2 comes along and there are "time aberrations" all over the place. One could argue that this is a result of the destruction of the Time Masters... but no one does.)
Personally I have no regrets about starting with S1: the doomed Hawkgirl/Ray Palmer romance had a few moments of genuine pathos. Mick Rory as Chronos the intertemporal bounty hunter worked for me. I especially enjoyed Wentworth Miller's Leonard Snart and his transformation from criminal to an actual hero. But S1 is trying really hard to be a Serious Action-y Show, and it just doesn't fit the characters well at all.
I'm glad I stuck with it, because S2 starts to become the wild and wacky time-travel show it wants to be. Hawkman and Hawkgirl are gone, and they're hardly missed (Snart, though :( ). In their place are Nate, an earnest young historian who gives Ray someone to banter with, and Amaya, a ... love interest for Nate. Can't win 'em all. Rip is mostly absent, and Sara Lance / White Canary takes over as Captain. Caity Lotz does a great job with the meatier role, and Darvill in general does a much better job when he's onscreen.
The villains run circles around S1's overly-oily Vandal Savage. Villains, plural: assassins (and Assassins) Damien Darkh and Malcolm Merlyn are joined by "speedster" (evil Flash) Eobard Thawne. (I'm a sucker for speedsters, which probably means I should just watch Flash already.) They're all imported from elsewhere in the Arrowverse. There is a /lot/ of backstory to these villains that I missed, and sort of pieced together from reading summaries of Arrow and Flash. Here, though, they bicker. It's great. My only complaint is that I wish they'd cast Paul Gross as Malcolm instead of geek favourite John Barrowman. Barrowman just doesn't do quietly-menacing well enough for me. A minor complaint.
Halfway through the season there's a "crossover", which necessitated tracking down the corresponding episodes of Arrow and Flash. So that was kind of annoying, and the crossover itself was something of an interruption to the flow of the overall story. Oh well. Comic books gonna comic book.
The S2 plot is mostly goofy. The first half is running around trying to figure out what's going on; the second half is "collect the plot coupons before the Bad Guys do!" Then, as expected, the Bad Guys manage to steal and activate the combined Plot Coupon... and the last two episodes are just fantastic, scrappy heroes fighting against impossible odds with improbable plans and occasionally doing ridiculous things.
I'm told John Constantine shows up in S3. I am excited for this development.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-08 01:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-09 02:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-12-09 06:42 am (UTC)Was the Legion of Doom really S2? Somehow I thought it was later.
One scene from S2 in particular, with Ray and Eobard Thawne, where Thawne argues that he's not such a monster, I really wanted Ray to make an eloquent rebuttal. Something along the lines of:
"You have this awesome gift. No, not a gift — an achievement. Barry had a gift, but you made yourself this. And you could do so much good with it...but instead you hurt people. As far as I'm concerned, that makes you all the monster this poor world needs."
Flash. If you like speedsters, yeah, you should watch Flash. Just be prepared for yet another series of completely different mutable time travel rules. Out of Supergirl, Legends, and Flash, Flash is my favorite, but it does things with time travel that are batshit crazy...and not in the good way.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-12 12:56 am (UTC)Which is to say, yes, that would have been a fantastic response from Ray, and thematically apropos.
My innate completionism now has me going back and watching Arrow (I would have watched Flash but then I would have wanted to dig up the Arrow episodes that spawned it, and it just got to be too much to keep track of).