Legends of Tomorrow was the superhero TV show for people who were a bit sick of superhero shows. When it decided to stop being faithful to the comics it was inspired by and just be its own weird thing, that’s when it became kind of great.
The cancellation announcement after seven seasons wasn’t a surprise, but it’s a bummer. It was pretty much the last “Arrowverse” show I regularly watched (other than the excellent Superman and Lois, which isn’t really Arrowverse at all) and it was the one that did the best job of truly becoming its own unique self. I’m gonna miss it.
Legends was originally a kind of “all-star squadron” of random characters from other Arrowverse shows, all with various DC comic book ties – Firestorm, Captain Cold, The Atom, White Canary, Rip Hunter, Hawkman – but it abandoned the costumes, evolved into a series of silly time travel adventures and went pretty far from its comic book-roots – which annoyed some fans, but probably gained it some, too. By the end, Caity Lotz’s iron-jawed White Canary was the only Season 1 cast member left, and any real resemblance to existing DC Comics characters was tangential indeed.
It wasn’t afraid to be blissfully, curiously weird, something a lot of the current superhero movie glut fails to be. Legends had a madcap ‘80s Dr. Who meets silver age DC Comics vibe and leapt through history with merry abandon. No other show on television would have featured a psychic gorilla trying to assassinate young Barack Obama, a “tickle me Elmo” type toy becoming a Viking god of war, or a wrestling match in JFK’s Oval Office over nuclear armageddon. One week might feature David Bowie, the next a robot J. Edgar Hoover.
The show embraced the fact that a story of time-travel could really go anywhere, do anything, within budget, and as a result was far more creative and unpredictable week to week than the likes of Arrow and Flash. It built its own oddball cosmos and became a home for characters marooned from other shows, like Matt Ryan’s pitch-perfect John Constantine, who somehow managed to fit in.
There were lows – Adam Tsekhman’s Gary Green was an awful scenery-chewing nerd parody before they finally gave him some more depth, and the all-time worst Legends character was the brief addition of Mona Wu, an awkward and annoying stereotype. It was admittedly past its peak – I hated seeing characters go like Brandon Routh’s endearing Ray Palmer, Dominic Purcell’s grouchy Mick Rory and charming Nick Zano as “Steel,” and later seasons introduced some replacement characters who never really clicked for me, like the alien-hunter Spooner. But Lotz’s Sarah Lance provided a kick-ass moral centre for the show as the assassin who matures into a den mother for a team of goofballs and weirdos, and her romance with Ava (Jes Macallan) was both inspirational and darned cute to watch unfold.
Despite its flaws, Legends was consistently entertaining, week in and week out, even as the budgets shrank and the cast rotated and the show couldn’t match its big ambitions. It had a lot of heart, such as the season 7 episode where the cast successfully integrates World War II factories and wins a cheer from special guest star Eleanor Roosevelt, or the landmark 100th episode which paid tribute to the show’s twisting path and history. It was a show made with obvious love for its characters, a team of misfits inspired by C-list comic superheroes who became something much more along the way.
Its demise (along with the less long-lived Batwoman) kind of marks the finale of the Arrowverse, although the now decidedly mediocre Flash will stumble along a bit longer and hopefully it might somehow give a bit of closure to the cliffhanger ending for the Legends.
The Arrowverse was never perfect and many of the series would have benefitted by about half the number of episodes per season, but at its best – such as a far better Crisis on Infinite Earths live adaptation than I imagined possible – the Arrowverse was a lot of giddy fun, and Legends of Tomorrow was always the absurdist jester at the heart of that. Sail on, Wave Rider!
Nik Dirga 