DC's Legends of Tomorrow S05E01-02 Review: Hardly A Superhero Show Anymore

Legends of Tomorrow, Season 5, Episode 1: Meet the Legends; Episode 2: Miss Me, Kiss Me, Love Me

Episode One

Legends of Tomorrow is an enjoyable show, but at this point it's hardly a show based on DC comic characters, is it? Everyone is either an in-name-only adaptation or have diverged so much from their original adaptation or are just straight-up OC's created for the show. John Constantine's probably the only member of the cast that even feels like he's a quasi-faithful attempt at adapting a comic book character. The rest of the show has really embraced the sheer madness of just being a show about a group of time-traveling space policemen without any impulse control. And at this point I'm just sometimes kind of torn between really liking this very IDGAF mentality of the show to really wishing we got something that's a wee bit more faithful to the comics, y'know? At the same time, this is Legends of Tomorrow, and it really doesn't give two shits what you think, it's still going to be doing its own thing, and it's going to be zany and fun. And for all of the grief I may have about Legends being evolved so far beyond its initial conception, it's still a dang fun show to tune into, y'know?

Which is where we get the second first episode of Legends of Tomorrow's fifth season, "Meet the Legends", where apparently the entire episode is supposed to be a documentary that the U.S. government is doing in order to make sure they document what these so-called Legends of Tomorrow are doing after they gained fame at the end of the previous season. The montage of wacky Japanese ads in the beginning of the episode and the fact that apparently the Legends have to work to prove they're legit in order to not get the Waverider impounded or some shit is just pretty par the course for Legends. Oh, and also there's the dual emotional bombs of four of our heroes remembering the events of Crisis of Infinite Earths (which is mostly glossed over with a couple of lines of dialogue; as well as Sara mourning for the episode) and the whole Constantinepoint bit last season that ended up with Zari being poofed out of existence and replaced with Behrad.

The make-a-documentary trope is one that has been done a couple times in the Arrowverse, and I don't particularly feel like this episode is a particularly good showcase of it -- other than the expected "censor this" and "we're going to cut that out, right?" jokes, the documentary crew and the conclusion of the movie festival at the end that the Legends pooh-poo on are all just kind of just there. Hell, even the main timequake plot of Grigori Rasputin coming back to life again as an undying man ("Encores", as different members of the team insist) for realsies feels like it's just there. Don't get me wrong, it checks all of the boxes for an enjoyable Legends episode. Our heroes play dress-up; Rasputin is one hell of a hammy motherfucker; the Legends getting into hijinks and fucking up each other's plans as they execute like seven different plans at the same time are all good for a lark, and Sara's bit this episode is a neat bit of emotional depth. But it just feels like... it's just there, an average Legends of Tomorrow episode. And that doesn't mean that it's automatically bad because it doesn't innovate or whatever, since a repetitive fun episode is always at least fun, but at the same time it's just kind of there.

The Big Bad Plot (tm) is a follow-up on one of the better reveals of the previous season, that Astra Logue, the girl that Constantine couldn't save and is angsting over, is basically a goddamn soul baroness in hell, and she's the one sending historical villains back to the time when they died, and that's going to be a neat source of angst for Constantine. I do worry that it's going to fall back to the same old 'can you redeem the villain??' storyline with Nora Darrhk for the past couple of seasons, but there's enough differences in it for me to be invested. For one, unlike Nora, Astra isn't the slightest bit conflicted about what she's doing; and Constantine's way more prone into doing more morally ambiguous things than Boy Scout Ray. (For one, Constantine spends a good chunk of this episode taking a demon-in-a-kid's-body out for a drink to a pub).

There are a couple of status quo shakeups, of course. Mona (who honestly never really worked as well as the show hoped she would) gets more or less benched as Mick hands over the reins of his smut-novel writing pseudonym to her. And it's kind of a good thing, too -- Mick being a novelist started off as a charming one-off joke everyone loved into a little recurring aspect of the character that everyone loved into something that the show really loves beating into our heads at the expense of everything else about Mick's character. Also written out of the show is Nora, who's no longer Gary's fairy godmother but, is sort of a freelance fairy or some shit? Eh. Oh, and also, while trying to fix the weird, buggy Gideon AI, Nate ends up discovering a hologram message from Zari (when did she have time to record it?) before reality re-aligns itself and Gideon ends up having absolutely no memory of the message she played.

Anyway, depite my slight negative tone for the review, I still really did enjoy this fun, wacky romp. The jokes are on-point, the acting (Caity Lotz in particular) is on-point, it's just that the premise of the episode itself feels just a bit too samey to feel like it's meant to be this big season premiere. Still, s'okay.

Episode Two:

That said, while Legends is fun, the episodes I've seen so far have been pretty samey. And that's not a bad thing; Legends is a fun show and it having fun episodes is basically what it's meant to do, but it also means that I think I'll be a lot more comfortable dipping into multi-episode reviews (and will probably do so for other superhero series that I watch from this point on). "Miss Me, Kiss Me, Love Me" is... it's another 'samey' Legends episode and don't get me wrong, it's still fun as all hell, but there really isn't a whole ton for me to say here. We pick a time period; this time the gangster-themed noir set as our heroes try and stop an immortal Bugsy Siegel. This isn't the first time Legends have done an old-school gangster time jump, and the one we got here is... it's, again, pretty fun, and there's enough moving parts in the episode as Ray, Constantine, Ava, Sara and Mick all get a bit tangled up in the different tropes of the time period with the corrupt cop, the self-serving dame, the big mob boss, et cetera. It's entertaining, but doesn't really give me a whole ton to really discuss.

It's Ava that ends up taking center stage this episode (after Sara's relatively muted affair last episode) as she ends up basically trying her dang best to fit in, talking to Mick about it as she has to struggle with being a clone-robot person that's been tailor-made to lead the Time Bureau (yeah, that weird sci-fi backstory for the Bureau is just kind of ignored now, huh) for her entire life into being... well, basically free. This leads to an embarrassing drunk-singing moment, and Ava basically nestling into having a place on the ship. There's a lot of fun discussion between Mick, Ava and Sara. In Mick's eyes, this position of deciding where you go, being unburdened to anything and anyone other than your family, is just straight-up freedom. For Ava, she just feels utterly lost. It's a pretty fun aspect of these characters to explore, and a fair bit more interesting than the season premiere's "guys let Sara mourn healthily please".

Meanwhile, Nate hangs out with Behrad's family and stumbles upon new-timeline Zari Tomaz, who is a gloriously fun oh-em-gee-guys instagram celebrity. The acting is great, what with Zari being a gloriously confused over-the-top celebrity, while Nate's trying to not come off as a stalker creep when he's talking about all of this "I knew you from another life" bit, and poor clueless Behrad's just trying to stop Nate from getting into her sister's pants. Zari ends up, throughout the episode, figuring out where she saw Nate before -- a video of the Legends' exploits at some point in the past, and she's baffled how Nate and Behrad somehow showed up like 50 years ago or something, leading to the big moment at the end of the episode with Nate and Behrad teleporting Amnesiac!Zari into the Waverider. Okay, then. I can't lie, I've never been a big fan of amnesia plotlines, and most 'alternate reality amnesia' storylines in comic books have never wowed me, but at least this one is well-acted? I'm not particularly invested, but I am kind of interested to see where this goes.

The Constantine/Astra bit continues with another confrontation, but we're just at the second episode in a season so obviously it leads nowhere. Bugsy Siegel somehow got his hands on this cool hell-gun with hell-vaporizing bullets that can murder demons and we briefly get a discussion on the Legends weaponizing the hellgun against Astra. And Constantine straight up just teleports back to hell and waltzes up to Astra's bar and murders a bunch of her bodyguards, but ends up not having the heart to pull the trigger on her, instead vaporizing Siegel instead.

Anyway, an all right second episode. Again, I really do find these episodse to be fun dumb devil-may-care fun, but at the same time I really don't find much to talk about a fair bit of these. It's just fun to watch, y'know? Just zany fun, and sometimes that's all you need a show to be.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• The little chibi drawing featured in "Meet the Legends" is courtesy of long-time Arrowverse fan artist Lord Mesa, whose work was previously featured in an episode of Arrow. 
• Ryan Reynolds is noted to be starring in a "Detective Beebo" movie, which of course is a nod to how in real life, Ryan Reynolds starred as Detective Pikachu. 
• The four video clips in the documentary of people reacting to the Legends' exploits are actual real-life youtubers who make reactions to Legends of Tomorrow episodes, namely the channels Blindwave, Free Bicycle Tours, Abnormallyadam and Married2TheReal.