DC’s Legends of Tomorrow ended its seventh season on a cliffhanger, and then was cancelled. with no eighth season in sight, fans were divided: should the cliffhanger stand until and unless Legends gets some kind of official follow-up, or should one or more of the characters show up on The Flash to give viewers a sense of what happened? The debate continues among Legends and Arrowverse fans on social media, and has picked up a little steam in the last couple of days, with reports that numerous Arrowverse characters, including Oliver Queen himself, would be returning for The Flash‘s final run.
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But from a quick glance at Twitter, it seems most fans of Legends of Tomorrow would rather live with their unfinished business, than have the story resolved on The Flash. This makes sense for a few reasons.
First, Legends of Tomorrow had a large cast — not that you would necessarily have known it watching most of the Arrowverse crossover episodes. In addition to White Canary (Caity Lotz), The Atom (Brandon Routh), and Heat Wave (Dominic Purcell), who regularly appeared in events like “Elseworlds” and “Crisis on Earth-X,” Legends was home to numerous other characters that got little or no screen time when those events happened.
Since producers were aware that seven might be the end of the line, each of the characters had their own distinct storyline going on when the finale happened. This was, essentially, their “ending” if you chose to ignore the cliffhanger finale and just prefer to think they all lived happily ever after. But it also means that each of them had their own distinct thing that you would need to wrap up, in order to give the show a meaningful sendoff. Wrapped up in that was the idea that some of their “things” did not seem totally compatible, so a couple like Astra Logue (Olivia Swann) and Behrad Tarazi (Shayan Sobhian) would have their own stories, plus the shared story of their relationship. It’s…a lot.
Historically, the other Arrowverse shows have gotten around the large cast and their varied interests by treating the Legends a monolith. Sara (Lotz) will show up on another show and go “oh, yeah, the team didn’t want to do another crossover,” or something like that. The audience could chuckle, and it didn’t much matter. Doing that now, after the show’s cancellation, would be jarring, and raise more questions than it answered.
Second, while the Arrowverse has been one of the most consistent and intricately interconnected live-action superhero narratives of all time, Legends developed a unique tone. As the show got weirder, more experimental, and less like a traditional superhero show, something started to become evident in their guest appearances: the other shows didn’t really seem to know how to write the Legends.
For the most part, as noted above, only a few of the best-known actors would appear in any show except Legends itself — most commonly Caity Lotz and Dominic Purcell, who tended to be the easiest to characterize. While they certainly grew and changed during their time as Legends, Sara and Mick were people who naturally lived a lot of their lives with their guard up. When they weren’t around the team, it seemed perfectly normal for them to revert to the personalities they had when they were on Arrow and The Flash, which made them easier for the writers on those shows to wrap their heads around.
It’s easy — very easy, and maybe the one thing that Legends fans have expected the most — to imagine The Flash bringing in Sara Lance, only to have her say “Oh, yeah, those knuckleheads. Luckily I got them out of it!” And have that be the “satisfying conclusion” to the cliffhanger. That’s…not ideal. If that was the extent of a “Legends wrap-up,” most would argue it wasn’t worth it.
Lastly, there’s the comics. The recent Earth-Prime event comic established, without going into specifics, that Sara and the Legends made it out of “time jail” just fine, and continued to have adventures years into the future, with Ray and Nora’s kids playing with Mick’s and Mona Wu returning as a nanny. Those comics are ostensibly canon (except Superman & Lois, which takes place on Earth-Prime, whereas the show does not), and they give the Legends a sendoff. It may not be a great one, but for anyone who might be satisfied with a two-minute Sara Lance cameo and a 30-second exposition dump…well, the comics at least gave you a lot more than that.
Note: Adam Mallinger, who wrote the Superman & Lois comic, clarified:
DC’s Legends of Tomorrow was a smart, funny, boundary-pushing superhero show that deserves a chance to wrap up…but the writers and crew behind the show deserve to wrap it up on their terms, not to be awkwardly shoehorned into another character’s final chapter, creating an unsatisfying story that would please neither group of fans. While the cliffhanger is a bummer, if that’s all the fans ever get…well, it’s still kind of a perfectly Legends way to end things. And for those who want a canonical voice to say “no, really, things turned out fine…well, there’s the comics. They have already done it.
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