Why Legends of Tomorrow Fans Shouldn't Panic About Renewal (Yet)

For the last few years, The CW has been very bullish about early renewals, sometimes picking up their entire slate of shows for another year all at the same time. That hasn't happened this year, and with its season 7 finale coming in less than a week, that has fans of DC's Legends of Tomorrow a little spooked. It doesn't help that Wednesday's penultimate episode, which centered on the idea of the Legends retiring from being time-traveling superheroes, took a nearly 20% hit in the ratings over the previous episode. That's never a great look for a show that's on the bubble.

But whether Legends of Tomorrow is on the bubble or not is pure speculation at this point. While rumors that the show had already been given a season 8 pickup turned out not to be true, it still seems more likely than not. 

Ratings are certainly a concern on one level, but Legends routinely outperforms other shows that The CW has renewed in recent years. Charmed gets a little bit more love in the coveted 18-49 demo than Legends, but those are about the only people watching it. Last year, the series averaged about 100,000 fewer viewers on average than Legends got this week, and still got picked up. Ditto for Dynasty, which lags well behind Legends in both total audience and the demo. All three of those shows perform fairly well on digital platforms, which is certainly part of the math, but the point here is that overnight ratings are not the end-all, be-all that they used to be. And even if they were, a quick look at TV Series Finale's ratings roundup reveals that season 6 averaged a 0.08 rating in the 18-49 demographic and 416,000 viewers. Season 7 has actually increased both numbers, averaging 0.09 in the demo and 538,000 up to this point. Legends is also a rarity on The CW in that their season finales sometimes do bigger numbers than their premieres, which would bode well for next week's numbers.

That's all numbers, and presented without context, but it's an important facet of the conversation.

The arrival of Scrubs star Donald Faison in next week's finale also bodes well for the show. Most fans are speculating that the actor will be playing the Arrowverse's version of Booster Gold, a cult-favorite DC hero that fans have long waited to see pop up on Legends. That would be the first new DC hero in years, as most new characters in recent seasons have been original characters created for the show. It would also feel at least somewhat like a throwback to prior season finales, where characters like Hourman (Patrick J. Adams) and Constantine (Matt Ryan) have shown up to set up the new adventure and kickstart a new team-up.

Virtually all season, fans have had a rumor hanging over their head that Nick Zano, who plays Nate Heywood/Steel on the show, would be leaving the series. Fueled by social media posts from Zano and others involved with the series, the rumors seem likely to be true, but the way he has been singled out feels more like Nate moving on, than the whole show being shut down. There's no guarantee we are reading those posts (which were later deleted) correctly, or that the cast and crew had a bead on the odds of renewal at the time they were posted, but it's a good (if vague) sign. 

In terms of Zano's departure? We hear through the grapevine that it's almost certainly true, so if there's a season 8, it's likely that Booster was brought in to replace Steel as the guy who's invulnerable (Booster has a forcefield) and able to break down historical data (he's from the future and has a floating supercomputer for a sidekick) in Nate's absence.

There's also this week's episode.

One of the things that got Legends fans panicking on social media was exactly how much "Too Legit to Quit" felt like a series finale. The Gideon AI that has been pursuing the Legends all year agreed to leave them alone, provided the human Gideon (Amy Pemberton) would join her in keeping the timeline orderly. Everyone agreed in principle, we got glimpses of their future lives, and there was even a bon voyage party. If this were the season finale, that would be hugely worrying in terms of renewal prospects.

It wasn't, though. it was the penultimate episode, and at the end, things got ugly. AI Gideon seemingly murdered Gary (Adam Tsekhman) and lied about it to the human Gideon. She in turn had lied to Gwyn Davies (Matt Ryan) by presenting a robotic version of Gwyn's beloved Alun (Tom Forbes) as the real thing. Gwyn figured it out almost immediately, and "killed" the robot, setting the stage for a finale that will see the Legends head to World War I.

One thing became clear in those final moments: the timeline is not safe in the hands of the Gideon AI, and even in her "compromises" with her human counterpart, she cannot be trusted. The mere fact that she can now lie to the ship's captain means that she is badly compromised. That means, even if the mission to World War I wraps up quickly and easily, the team will have to either retake or destroy the Waverider. And if it's destroyed, thanks to the absence of the Time Masters (who died at the end of season 1) or the Time Bureau (which effectively stopped functioning after the Heyworld event in season 4), somebody will need to be watching the timeline. 

The entire premise of this season has revolved around a central conceit: are the Legends really the best people to be doing this job? Should they step aside and let someone more professional and "capable" do it? That idea isn't even subtext; producers were talking about it openly at the start of the season, suggesting that the Legends might have to ask themselves if there's someone out there who can do the job better. That played out with a villain that believes the Legends have to be replaced, but it would be kind of narratively unsatisfying if the Legends collectively decided after nearly a decade on the Waverider that Gideon was right.

What seems more likely is that the team will redefine their mission next season, potentially working on a smaller and more personal scale, with Booster serving as a guide. After all, the character description for Faison's mystery character describes him as being forced to keep the timeline safe after being discovered as an outlaw time traveler. The smaller scale would also make sense given that, when some of our heroes were having crises of faith in this week's episode, the moments that came up to encourage them were things like saving a man's bar, or helping a factory to unionize. 

That wasn't an accident. Executive producer Phil Klemmer told ComicBook in October that the new season was built to "force these people to think that they know themselves, but really get to know each other in a much deeper way, because different stresses are being applied to them, and hopefully they're real stresses."

Klemmer explained, "It's not like, 'Oh my God, there's a dragon flying around Heyworld,' and, 'How do we fix Zari's future so that her brother doesn't die?' It's like, 'Oh, man, how do we help this random person that we encountered on a road trip who never would have appeared to us because,' -- I'm using air quotes here, -- 'he was not significant to history.' When you're staring that person in the face and you're realizing, 'He's a person, we're a person, we're all stuck in 1925...Idk, I guess we were once superheroes, but now we're just all people. We have to help this person.' The whole show is about, 'We have to restore history, we have to restore history.' Now they meet all these people who are clearly a part of history, but they were invisible to the history books. The Legends are realizing, 'Look, we can't do the spectacular world saving things that we've done in years past, but what if we can do this on a more modest scale? What if that's more satisfying? It's awesome to be able to save the world, but if you could connect with a person and make their life somehow better...."

That's the rub in this finale: Gwyn is just one person they found along the way, and now he might be a Legend (or at least Legend-adjacent), but in the scheme of history, he is no more significant than the original group of Legends were when Rip Hunter rounded them up as potential cannon fodder because he knew their lives and deaths wouldn't amount to much.

Five years after that, Sara Lance was the Paragon of Destiny, and helped save the multiverse in the Crisis.

That alone tells you that, no matter how it looks on paper, the Legends really do "screw things up for the better." There isn't a better crew to do their job, and that means the fundamental conceit of last week's "retirement" episode is flawed on the face of it.

DC's Legends of Tomorrow airs on Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.