DC’s Legends of Tomorrow cross paths with another well-known DC character in “The Magnificent Eight.” They are a lot further out of their element than usual, but it’s really entertaining to see how some of them react to a very romanticized era in history. We also finally learn a bit more about the enigmatic Rip Hunter.
There are a few spoilers here. I generally try to avoid those, but I needed to include them for the review to work. Proceed at your own risk.
Legends of Tomorrow “Left Behind” picks up pretty much where the previous episode stopped.
The Legends of Tomorrow crew take a trip to the 1950’s in “Night of the Hawk.” There are tensions and unanswered questions among the team, and that’s before they end up in the sleepy little town of Harmony Falls, which is, as Jax says, just like all the towns where old horror movies start. Everything looks normal until things take a turn for the ugly.
For this week’s episode, “Marooned,” they seem to be patterning themselves off their companion show, Arrow. A good bit of the show is flashback, in this case showing us something of the origins of Captain Rip Hunter. We already know what led to his split with the Time Council, now we get to see the roots of that problem.
At the end of last episode, the Waverider took a nasty hit from the bounty hunter Kronos, sicced on Rip and friends by the Time Master Council. They managed to get away, but the ship was badly damaged, and they went in for a crash. The trick with a ship that moves in space and time is, when crashing, you don’t know where, or when, you’re going to land.
Last week, the “Legends” crew ended up in Cold War Russia. Things did not go well, and the team was divided both physically and by some of Rip’s decisions. This week, the Russian adventure concludes with a few surprises and twists along the way in “Fail-Safe.”
The Legends of Tomorrow continue their quest through time in “White Knights.” This title could have several meanings. They say phrase several times throughout the episode. There was a movie in 1985 that had a similar setting. And one of the characters has a connection, in the comics at least, to an organization that used different color chess pieces as titles for their members.
DC’s Legends of Tomorrow continues their sojourn in the 1970’s with this week’s “Blood Ties.” The feud between Rip and Vandal Savage goes back further than we realized. They had a run in in 1700 BC Egypt. It didn’t go that well, in part because Rip Hunter is a good man, and Savage is, well, Savage.
In the second part of the pilot, Legends of Tomorrow finishes setting up the status quo for the show. They are still in 1975, now trying to get a better fix on where Vandal Savage is, after getting the information from Professor Boardman. They are already developing some quirks- apparently flying on the Waverider, whether through time or just normal space, doesn’t agree with Mick Rory, Heat Wave.
After a lot of preview material, and a slow build across both Arrow and Flash, Legends of Tomorrow finally debuts, the newest addition to the CW-verse, or Arrow-verse, depending on which name you like better. Rip Hunter gathers a group of heroes and villains both to fight the immortal evil of Vandal Savage. Except for Rip himself, all of the other characters have appeared on Flash and/or Arrow. It really was one of the longest builds to a new series I can remember seeing. The CW shows are showing the same attention to continuity and building a cohesive world that Marvel Studios is using on their shows, and the DC movies so far have utterly failed to.
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