by Thom Yee

Legends of Tomorrow images courtesy of Warner Brothers Television Distribution

1×16: “Legendary”

One of the things that got me most excited about Legends of Tomorrow was seeing all of these different superheroes and villains working together, unfettered, in the series’ first teaser trailer. As a comicbook fan whose introduction to the medium was through big, sprawling, and, frankly, confusing books like Crisis on Infinite Earths (a twelve-issue maxi-series that starred multiple iterations of the same character in a story about the destruction and reformation of the DC Universe’s multiverse into one single Earth), I developed an early appetite for gigantic collections of heroes in massive group shots working together against a common bad guy as drawn by classic artists like George Perez, so scenes involving almost all of the Berlanti-verse heroes that have developed over the years in raids on bad guy compounds or flying at top speed through the sky hit right where I live when it comes to this genre. Continue reading →

by Thom Yee

Legends of Tomorrow images courtesy of Warner Brothers Television Distribution

1×15: “Destiny”

If you look at everything that’s happened on Legends of Tomorrow as the story of Leonard Snart, from cold-hearted thief to reluctant teammate to eventual hero, and you look at it only from that perspective while willfully ignoring most everything else that’s happened (especially anything having to do with Kendra), things look kind of okay from there.

Kind of.

Otherwise, what a f*cking mess. Continue reading →

by Thom Yee

Legends of Tomorrow images courtesy of Warner Bros. Television Distribution

1×13: “Leviathan”

And now… the real game begins. Or at least that’s what I thought was happening.

In travelling forward to the one time the legends know they can find Vandal Savage — just before the precise moment they’ve been trying to prevent this whole time — we find a future ravaged by war with only a few refugees of Savage’s population-decimating virus remaining in rundown camps. With danger approaching the refugees, Professor Stein finds himself unable to ignore their plight, taking the entire camp aboard the Waverider while they form their plans for taking Savage down one last time. Continue reading →

by Thom Yee

Legends of Tomorrow images courtesy of Warner Bros. Television Distribution

1×12: “Last Refuge”

It’s gotten to be almost impossible to watch Legends of Tomorrow without finding some pretty big logic problems in the gang’s time-travelling shenanigans, but as big as the problems would have to be in a story where the legends try to prevent their latest villain, the Pilgrim, from murdering their younger selves, they didn’t bug me as much as they normally do.

After first rescuing the young Heatwave, fresh off of accidentally killing his entire immediate family after losing control of a house fire that he set, the legends proceed to rescue the young Sara before losing the Pilgrim when Gideon can no longer track her, and then devise a plan to kidnap themselves as newborns, thus, preventing themselves from building a timeline on which the Pilgrim can strike. There’s a base level on which almost none of this makes sense, particularly when that last bit means erasing themselves from existence, but the more I thought about it, the more I started building my own internal logic about the whole thing. Continue reading →

by Thom Yee

Legends of Tomorrow images courtesy of Warner Bros. Television Distribution

1×11: “The Magnificent Eight”

Temporal blindspots, eh?

At the end of last week’s episode, we learned that the Time Masters had intensified their hunt, sending the mysterious (and non-creatively named) Hunters to find our legends after Chronos (nee Heatwave) had failed to capture them, a development that prompted many of us to think to ourselves, “Huh? Oh yeah, the Time Masters. Those are the guys who are chasing our guys, right?” To say that Legends of Tomorrow has lacked urgency in its first ten episodes would be an understatement, and for most of this week’s episode, that’s very much a trend that’s continued. Continue reading →

by Thom Yee

Legends of Tomorrow images courtesy of Warner Bros. Television Distribution

1×10: “Progeny”

Time travel’s always an intriguing concept for any story, but it’s also a tricky-wicky thing to stick the landing on, and the more it plays a central role in the story, the more the whole thing tends to fall apart under the stress of underlying logic. Even putting aside some of the basic, cause-and-effect and what-happens-to-that-cause-after-changing-the-effect questions, a lot of time-travel stories just don’t make that much sense when you think about them too much.

Continue reading →