When it comes to DC television, the Arrowverse is some of the best. Kicking off in 2012 with Arrow, the franchise of connected, DC Comics inspired television series would eventually grow to six series and run for 11 years, treating audiences to a wide range of superheroes, villains, comic book-based stories, and even some of the most ambitious crossovers that rival anything else we’ve seen in live action. But while most of the Arrowverse series centered around venerable heroes and their allies, there’s one series that was all about the misfits. It ended up being the best that the franchise had to offer and it’s 10 years since it debuted.
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Premiering on January 21, 2016, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow was a different sort of superhero series from the start. Featuring characters that were first introduced in Arrow and The Flash, along with a few new characters, the premiere episode itself wasn’t much to write home about as the immortal warrior Vandal Savage conquers Earth int he future and prompts Time Master Rip Hunter to travel back in time to put together a team of superheroes (and supervillains) to stop him. However, despite a sort of basic premise and a lackluster start, Legends turned out to be a plucky show bolstered by some great performances and endearing characters and while it may never have found the appreciation the rest of the Arrowverse held during its run, the series carved its own niche and was all the better for it.
DC’s Legends of Tomorrow Wasn’t Afraid to Have Fun in the Superhero Space
Setting Legends apart from the jump was its characters who were genuine, well, characters. Mick Rory/Heatwave (Dominic Purcell), Leonard Snart/Captain Cold (Wentworth Miller) Sara Lance/White Canary (Caity Lotz), Ray Palmer/Atom (Brandon Routh) and even Martin Stein/Firestorm (Victor Garber) and Jax Jackson/Firestorm (Franz Drameh) were all interesting and charismatic. While Season 2 of the series would see some cast shakeups with Ciara Renee and Falk Hentschel departing as Hawkgirl and Hawkman, new characters would rotate in, giving the team a colorful and fun dynamic. It was easy to feel like this team was less a team and more a loving, dysfunctional family of weirdoes which made it even more fun to watch.
Once the series sorted out how the character structure would work, however, it also sorted out the tone and by the second season, Legends leaned fully into its major point of difference: this was a superhero show that didn’t take itself seriously. Time travel, a critical component of Legends, is always something that can lend itself to some silliness, but Legends went all in. The series embraced the lighter side of things, with fun pop culture references — there were episode where they literally had to save the creation of Star Wars and an episode that involved the Arrowverse version of Godzilla — and even let its more serious storylines get a little silly. What other superhero series would use an in-universe fuzzy blue plush toy named Beebo and turn it into a full-on character who ends up worshiped by Vikings, prompting the heroes to have to literally save the world? The character ended up so popular that it got its own Christmas special and ended up being conjured as a massive kaiju at one point to take down an actual serious big bad. It was insane, but it also completely worked and was entirely in line with everything the show was about.
Legends also was a show that mined the depths of comics to tell wide-ranging stories that appealed to all manner of DC fan. At any given point you might encounter completely unexpected characters, such as Jonah Hex in both Season 1 and Season 2. Constantine — played by Matt Ryan who was directly reprising the role from the short-lived Constantine series — even joined the team in Season 4. These additions, and others like them, made for a series that felt expansive even with more intimate storytelling. It felt whole in a way that the rest of the Arrowverse didn’t, which is also why it made things all the more interesting when it was crossover time and the Wavewrider descended into whatever insanity that the universe was facing and needed the Legends to help with.
Sadly, while Legends was the best of the Arrowverse, it didn’t get to finish its story. The series ultimately was cancelled after seven seasons and the Season 7 finale was not written to be a series finale. The series essentially played chicken with its ending by introducing Booster Gold and leaving things on a cliffhanger with the Legends being arrested. We’ll never know quite how things work out for our wacky misfit heroes but in a way, that’s kind of perfect. For a series that was about rough around the edges heroes and villains saving the world doing the unexpected, leaving things off with a question feels just right.
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