Some spoiler-y thoughts on the conclusion of the two-part “Legends of Tomorrow” premiere coming up just as soon as I pick fights with the PLO…
You may recall that I wasn't crazy about “Legends” based on this two-parter. There are too many characters thrown together solely because, as Rip himself admitted late in last week's episode, they all had nothing better to do. The tone's all over the place, particularly considering the very big performances most of the actors are joyfully giving, and the Hawks and Vandal Savage – theoretically the center of this whole thing – were by far the weakest characters.
Well, this episode at least resolved some of that last problem, at least temporarily, by killing off Hawkman. But since the Hawks' whole schtick is that they always resurrect, and since the series' gimmick involves the team traveling back and forth in time, I'll eat my hat if some version of Hawkman is not back on the team by season's end. And because he was being killed off here, the pilot had to race through the various emotional beats about what Kendra did and didn't know and feel about her many previous lives with Carter.
Part 2 had its moments, even if the “Back to the Future”-ish subplot about Stein accidentally preventing his own marriage would have had a whole lot more resonance if Part 1 had bothered to give us even 30 seconds with Mrs. Stein in 2016. The battle against Savage and Demian Dahrk's forces, meanwhile, illustrated that while the show's VFX department can successfully convey the varied power set of all these heroes, the sheer number of characters risks making any group fight scene too chaotic to follow. That so much of the rest of the episode split them into smaller groups suggests the creative team knows this, but there's still a lot of work to be done to figure out how many characters should be appearing in any one scene, and in what combinations.
Embedded at the top and bottom of this post is a video of me and Roth Cornet talking about the two-parter, and I'm curious what you all thought. After two weeks, are you all in on this show? Done already? Continuing to watch with serious reservations? And if you were given the power to choose which other heroes (or villains) to kick off the time ship to get the cast down to a more manageable size, who would be the first to go?