Legends of Tomorrow, Season 6, Part 1 Review:

DC's Legends of Tomorrow, Season 6

I am ever so slowly making my way through the late-2020 and 2021 releases for the CW/DC shows, and... and among them, I think Legends of Tomorrow has and always will be the easiest to review due to how gloriously irreverent and joke-driven it is. And that's not a complaint at all -- that's why I keep coming back to this show despite it not reeeally being a superhero show since, oh, season three? But it's a buttload of fun. Which brings us here! Into Legends of Tomorrow, its wacky period costumes and its annual time-travel-with-sometimes-superhero-hijinks stories!

A bit of a rapid-fire review here. Again, I'm trying to experiment with how to handle these TV reviews. After this, I believe I'll do... probably Black Lightning? Or Supergirl? One of the two 'finale seasons'? We'll see. 

Episode 1: Ground Control to Sara Lance

I do like that the show does low-key do a re-introduction of all our characters via a series of scenes showing Mick picking everyone up one by one from where they've ended up. Considering Legends' rather insane secondary-team turnover rate and actors playing different characters, it's neat that we get a refresher of last season's newcomers Astra, Zari 2.0 and Behrad. Oh, and also Sara's abducted by aliens. David Bowie's here too. It's... it's an all-right debut episode, with a pretty heavy emphasis on 'Sara Lance is the leader of the team, the team kinda has to learn to work together without her'. But the concept of alien abductions (even ones that apparently abducted Spartacus -- is he even a real historical figure?) isn't the most interesting out there in a show that shares a multiverse with Supergirl. So the twist is... Gary's an alien! Who uses glasses to masquerade as a human! It's... it's kind of bullshit-random, but it's exactly the sort of bullshit-random comedy that only really works in a show like this. The episode still ends with Sara and Gary stuck on the alien ship, and a bunch of alien cages tossed into the timeline. Overall, an all-right, if slightly low-key, season opener. 

Episode 2: Meat the Legends

The main plot for this one actually would make for a pretty cool standalone alien monster concept in itself, although of course Legends basically takes it to its logically most ridiculous conclusion. The main idea is the dynamic between the desperate Ava and the unwilling new member Spooner, whose superpower is being an alien radar. Turns out, though, that the alien in this case is the secret meat juice being served in the proto-Big-Belly-Burger that causes anyone who eats it to have an intense craving for meat, fattening themselves up for a fake Mothra alien to consume. Pretty fun hijinks all around, even if I really didn't care for the Zari/Behrad subplot about sharing their ring or whatever. Because this is Legends, that particular plot point is quite literally handwaved by Zari 1.0 randomly splitting the wind totem into two. Sure!

The B-plot involves Sara and Gary running around the alien planet of Gary's employer, and they meet "Amelia Earheart", who also turns out to be a hostile force. It's slow burn, and this ends up feeling like the counterpart to the Constantine storyline in the previous season that has a different tone and is kind of divorced from the rest of the season. 

Episode 3: The Ex Factor

Not the biggest fan of this one, to be honest, although it might be my personal apathy towards the genre that this episode is parodying -- reality talent shows. The idea is fun -- a seemingly-robotic alien arrives and is driven by a prime directive to challenge and kill the king of the planet. Due to miscommunication, he decides to kill Zari 2.0's ex-boyfriend, DJ S'mores, otherwise known as the guy with a marshmallow on his head. Due to threat of an armada of alien warships blowing up Earth, our heroes decide to smuggle in Zari as the competitor to defeat Lord Knoxacrillion in a talent show. It's some Rick & Morty plot, and... and this episode tries to give a bunch of drama to Constantine and Zari's not-relationship, but while the acting and especially singing is pretty neat, I really didn't care for the romance. There are also a lot of weird sub-plots that really didn't go nowhere, like Zari's mother or her treacherous assistant or Zari's brand losing credibility in 2045... I dunno. The episode was fun, but it feels like there are chunks missing from this one. The B-plot is Ava and Spooner confronting Mick for being a jackass throughout the first couple of episodes, which is neat. 

Meanwhile, Gary eats people, Sara is suffering from infections and hallucinations, and the planet's full of Ava Sharpe clones. 

Episode 4: Bay of Squids

Eh. I guess I probably would've cared more about this episode if they didn't go so over-the-top with the caricatures of the Cuban Missile crisis era historical characters? Admittedly, this kind of comedy is very much on-brand with the show, but this time I just really didn't care for any of them at all. I guess it's a lot less funny when these are the guys are only separated from us by a single generation? Not a huge fan of how global the change in history for this episode is either, though as this episode itself notes, legends has really stopped giving two shits about whether time travel works. Not a particularly huge fan of the Behrad B-plot, or the shipping-flirting bit between Nate and Zari, or the something-something-football sequence. 

Ava and Mick's arguments, though? With Mick trying to show that he's more of a thug, and Ava being so angry about everything that she drives Mick away? That's actually pretty well-acted. The twist that the alien is actually Gary's ex-fiancee Kayla and she's hanging out with Mick on the Waverider is okay, too. But otherwise, this one doesn't do it for me. 

Episode 5: The Satanists Apprentice

A bit of a weird one? I really didn't think we're going to get too much out of Astra after the previous season, but this episode is a huge focus for her, as she gets increasingly frustrated because John Constantine's way too horny with Zari and distracted to actually teach her how to live in the real world. The actor playing Astra is pretty fun, and at least Astra goes through a character arc here? I really didn't feel like it was interesting enough to be the main focus for the entire episode. Alistair Crowley the evil painting talking about the alien 'Fountain of Imperium' or whatever is a neat tie-in to the rest of the season, but most of the story in this one is pretty obvious. There's the whole Disney animated sequence in the end that is well-animated, but is also basically a joke stretched a bit too far. It's not the most exciting episode, but it's a neat one and I enjoyed it more than the Cuban one. 

After an episode of skipping them, we get to check in on Sara, who meets 'Bishop', the last human on whatever apocalyptic future he's from, who wants to recreate the human race after his extinction. He's also responsible for making the Ava clones, and he wants to make half-human, half-alien hybrids with the aliens he's captured. There's a B-plot of Sara being duped by the very obviously loyal-to-Bishop Ava clone. I mean, it sure is a B-plot and a revelation?

Episode 6: Bishop's Gambit

An... interesting one? I'm still not the biggest fan of the alien-planet storyline. Part of it is admittedly because Bishop isn't particularly engaging as a villain, and the twist that he's actually a clone of himself and the facility is set to make new Bishop clones if Sara kills them isn't really particularly threatening. But the revelation that the Sara we've been following throughout these episodes is actually technically Sara Lance 2.0, and the real Sara died when she fought Amelia Earheart is kinda well-done. We don't actually explore the angst behind this too much, though. The rest of the planetary stuff involves Mick and Kayla basically working through clenched teeth and eventually fucking in an alien pod. Okay, sure. There's also a sub-plot of Sara actually for-reals converting the Ava clones to her side, which I really didn't care about. 

The rest of the Legends hang out in Constantine's manor, driving him crazy. They eventually find Amelia Earheart and the Waverider, which conveniently crash-land in that specific time. Not... not a particularly huge fan of the story here, honestly, though I suppose the real focus of the episode is the off-world stuff. Spooner (who's still mostly a cipher) turn out to be the same sort of half-human, half-alien hybrid as Amelia, and communicate with alien-Amelia long enough for the guys to learn that Sara is dead. Also, there's a very vague sub-plot going between this one and the next of John Constantine losing his magic and having to let Astra do the magic for him, and he's hiding it from Zari? Eh. 

Episode 7: Back to the Future, Part II

Not the biggest fan of the previous two episodes, but this one is actually kind of fun. With everyone thinking that Sara is dead, the Legends team go back to... to whatever time period the previous season ended in order to enact some time paradox moment. It's mostly just fluff, since they didn't manage to actually do anything (going through with the mannequin plan would cause some sort of alternate timeline with eyepatch Nate). The focus here is less on the time travel hijinks and more on our heroes meeting and talking to Sara, though, and eventually realizing that they shouldn't go through with their history-altering plan? Or something? Behrad and Astra have a talk about how sometimes they have to do things otherwise they'll regret it in the future. Okay, sure. Spooner gets a pretty cool talk with Sara, too.

In space, Mick, Kayla, Gary and Sara plan to get out, but Sara, realizing that she's been spliced with another alien, thinks that she's a monster and wants to create a fully-human clone of herself before leaving the planet. There's an actually pretty cool moment when Sara has to choose between sacrificing her human body in exchange for stopping Bishop's resurrection permanently, leading to a pretty cool speech from Mick. Otherwise, though, it's mostly action scenes. Also, Kayla gets left behind and seemingly killed. And then everyone returns, gets reunited, and the episode closes with Sara proposing to Ava. 

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Overall... this half season had some fun moments. I don't think it's quite as solid as the previous seasons, though -- I still think that a lot of the newer additions like Behrad and Spooner still feel as ciphers, and the show really feels like it sometimes doesn't know what to do with some of the other characters like Nate and even Constantine in this arc. Sara, Mick and Ava all get pretty good storylines here, if you don't try to think too hard about how everything really works -- none of the timey-wimey stuff really hold up in previous seasons, but I think it's even worse in this one. Still, as the show itself wink-wink tells us, it's not like that's the top of the show's storytelling priorities.