UK TV recap: DC’s Legends of Tomorrow Season 1, Episode 1
Review Overview
Intriguing set-up
8Promising characters
7.5Teething problems
7Matthew Turner | On 05, Mar 2016
Warning: This contains spoilers.
And we’re off! After months of set-up in parent shows Arrow and The Flash, superhero spin-off Legends of Tomorrow has finally begun its run and the results are extremely promising, albeit with a few stumbles here and there. Defined by The CW’s network president Mark Pedowitz as “Guardians of the Galaxy meets Doctor Who”, the show delivers nicely on that premise, with a rag-tag group of superheroes embarking on a time-travel adventure in order to defeat an immortal supervillain.
As is the case with most pilot shows, Legends of Tomorrow (let’s just agree to call it Legends, shall we?) has a lot of heavy lifting to do in its opening episode, not least because there are so many characters to introduce and the show can’t really afford to rely on the entirety of its audience having watched all the relevant episodes of Arrow and The Flash. So, for those of you tuning in for the first time, here’s a quick run-down of the set-up and various characters:
In the year 2166, immortal supervillain Vandal Savage (Casper Crump) has successfully conquered the entire planet. In an effort to save humanity, time-traveller Rip Hunter (Doctor Who’s Arthur Darvil, a savvy spot of casting) travels back to 2016 to assemble a group of superheroes and supervillains to team-up and stop Savage’s rise to power*. These include: Ray Palmer / The Atom (Brandon Routh), who invented a super-suit with shrinking powers during Season 3 of Arrow; Sara Lance / White Canary (Caity Lotz), a recently resurrected (don’t ask – we really don’t have time for that right now) former member of the League of Assassins and sometime member of Team Arrow; flame-shooting meta-human Firestorm, who’s actually the combination of two people, Professor Martin Stein (Victor Garber) and former college football star Jefferson “Jax” Jackson (Franz Drameh); Flash supervillains Captain Cold / Leonard Snart (Wentworth Miller) and Heat Wave / Mick Rory (Dominic Purcell); and Hawkman / Carter Hall (Falk Hentschel) and Hawkgirl / Kendra Saunders (Ciara Renée), a pair of repeatedly reincarnating Egyptian warriors, who are destined to always be together and have a connection to Savage.
Got all that? Right then. The pilot episode quickly zips through Rip assembling his team, persuading them that in the future, they are legends because of the adventure they are about to begin together. Each character has their own motivation for joining the team, whether it’s scientific curiosity (Stein), a driving need to find their place in the world (Ray, Sara), or simply the desire to steal various treasures from various timelines (Snart, Rory). The exception is Jax, who’s drugged and kidnapped by Stein in a move that doesn’t exactly endear the Professor to the audience right off the bat – he’s meant to be a bit prickly and difficult, but really, this is going too far.
With the stakes established (they are shown a vision of a Savage-led future), the team time-travel to 1975, where they attempt to track down their future nemesis with the aid of a 60-something classics professor (Peter Francis James as Dr. Aldus Boardman), who turns out to be the son of Hawkman and Hawkgirl in one of their previous incarnations. However, Rip’s ship, the Waverider, is attacked by a time-travelling bounty hunter named Chronos and Boardman is killed in the attack, something that might have had more emotional impact if a) we’d spent enough time with Kendra and Carter beforehand, or b) Boardman had been given more than five minutes of screentime.
At any rate, Chronos’ attack leaves Rip with some explaining to do and he duly confesses to the group that the Time Masters sent a bounty hunter after him because he stole the ship, his mission is not officially sanctioned and that it’s actually a personal vendetta because Savage killed his wife and child (something we saw in the future-set opening of the show). Not only that, but he admits that he chose each member of the team not because they were a future legend, but because their lives had so little impact on the timeline. However, the team respond to Rip’s personal tragedy and agree to continue their adventure together, figuring that if they can change time, maybe they can change their own fates and truly make an impact after all.
Considering the amount of set-up involved, the show packs a decent amount of action into its first hour and the special effects and production design work are extremely impressive, particularly on the Waverider. The characters are well cast (Hentschel is maybe the weak link, being a little on the wooden side) and there’s a lot of promise for their future interactions, something showcased in the opening episode by the film’s best scene, when Sara, Snart and Rory decide to go and have some fun in a 70s bar while Rip, Stein and the Hawks are off meeting Boardman. The inevitable ensuing bar fight sequence – set to Captain & Tennille’s Love Will Keep Us Together, no less – is a huge amount of fun and hopefully a strong indicator of things to come. At any rate, this scene alone delivers on Pedowitz’s Guardians of the Galaxy comparison, with the period pop soundtrack and action combo almost feeling like a deliberate homage (in a good way).
That said, the pilot episode still has a few teething problems: Stein’s drugging of Jax remains problematic and it feels like the show has a lot of work to do on that relationship (to be fair, as shown on The Flash, Jax has only just become part of Firestorm, replacing Stein’s previous partner), while it’s difficult to invest in Carter and Kendra’s story, partly because again, we’ve spent relatively little time with them in Arrow and The Flash, but also because there’s no chemistry between the actors. Similarly, Casper Crump just doesn’t have the necessary Big Bad presence as Vandal Savage, plus we’ve already seen him defeated once on the Arrow / The Flash crossover, so how hard can it be to stop him again? Still, all of these issues are things that can be improved once the writing and performances have time to bed in.
All in all, this is an enjoyable pilot that introduces strong characters and showcases a degree of ambition in both set-up and execution. The show stands or falls on whether it does enough to have you wanting to tune into the next episode, and on that basis, Legends of Tomorrow’s opening episode passes with flying colours.
* (A side-note to anyone thinking “Rip Hunter? Rip-OFF, more like!” with regards to Darvill’s character – his comics counter-part first appeared in 1959, thereby pre-dating Doctor Who by four years.)
Legends of Tomorrow is available on Sky Box Sets. Don’t have Sky? You can catch up on-demand through NOW, as part of a £7.99 monthly subscription, no contract. A 7-day free trial is available for new subscribers.
Photo: © 2016 DC Comics. © 2016 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All rights reserved.