Last year, I made a case for Legends of Tomorrow being the weirdest, and therefore greatest, superhero TV show out there, and hoo boy, did I undersell it.
Legends of Tomorrow is still TV’s weirdest, greatest superhero show
The goofiest corner of The CW’s Arrowverse became its best self in season three.
Made up of odds and ends too big or too silly to fit anywhere else in The CW’s Arrowverse (also comprising Arrow, The Flash, and Supergirl), Legends of Tomorrow follows a group of DC Comics characters, and random relatives of DC Comics characters, as they alternately repair and destroy the fabric of time. It makes for an absurdly fun, live-action-cartoon approach to superhero TV.
In last year’s finale, the Legends broke time so badly that their former leader, Rip Hunter (Arthur Darvill), started a UN-sanctioned time travel enforcement agency called the Time Bureau just so he could have the authority to fire them. But the Legends, now led by the bold and reckless Sara Lance (Caity Lotz), refuse to go quietly, living by the motto “sometimes we screw things up for the better.” So they steal back their time machine, the Waverider, and go on the run, kicking off Legends of Tomorrow’s best season to date.
Season three, which aired its finale on April 9, took the best parts of the show — its humor, its fearlessness, and its heart — to new heights, and strengthened the case for its status as a top-tier superhero series. To illustrate exactly what distinguishes Legends from other, lesser superhero shows, here are the 10 most outrageous things you may have missed in its third season, which just hit Netflix in its entirety.
1) Return of the Mack
Outside of fixing their own mess, the Legends’ greatest challenge this season was Damien Darhk (Neal McDonough) and his daughter, Nora Darhk (Courtney Ford), using dark magic to free a time demon, whatever that is. Damien died on Arrow, but Nora raises him from the dead and his triumphant return is set to Mark Morrison’s 1996 hit “Return of the Mack.” No, really.
2) The Legends lost a fight to a guitar
To fight this time demon, the Legends need to track down six magical totems. The totem that commands the dead happens to be attached to the guitar of a young Elvis Presley, and if played, it will destroy the city of Memphis in 1954, erasing rock ’n’ roll from history and creating an alternate timeline where the video game Guitar Hero is replaced with Trombone Hero. A clear-cut, universal problem that could happen on any show.
The most ridiculous part? The haunted guitar kicks all their asses.
3) Kidnapped by the circus
While retrieving an anachronistic saber-toothed tiger from the circus, Ray Palmer (Brandon Routh) and Jax Jackson (Franz Drameh) get kidnapped and forced into the circus by P.T. Barnum himself (Billy Zane). You know, the guy from The Greatest Showman. In their defense, they were very drunk. Nate Heywood (Nick Zano) and Amaya Jiwe (Maisie Richardson-Sellers) get kidnapped trying to save them while completely sober, for which there is no excuse.
They do eventually escape, because circuses are a tent in a field and you can just walk away, but not before Mick Rory (Dominic Purcell) lets the saber-toothed tiger loose on the Waverider.
4) Gorilla Grodd vs. America
Gorilla Grodd, a super-intelligent psychic gorilla that the Legends run into during the Vietnam War, wants to create “One nation under Grodd” by killing President Lyndon B. Johnson. When that fails, he attacks a 2018 production of Hamilton attended by a time-displaced Alexander Hamilton, an adventure we sadly only see over video call. After that, he tries to kill a young Barack “Barry” Obama in 1979 to “Make America Grodd again,” a reference Obama won’t understand until 2015.
Clearly Grodd hates America and loves wordplay, making him the Legends’ most formidable villain to date.
5) When you can travel through time, it’s always 5 o’clock somewhere
The Legends of Tomorrow pilot included both a bar fight and a bong fight, so they’ve always been pretty laid-back when it comes to inebriating substances. However, this was the year Nate learned how to make psychedelic drugs in the kitchen, Amaya got a rum named after her, the Legends threw a Viking kegger during Mick’s intervention, and Rip recruited Wally West (Keiynan Lonsdale), an actual A-List superhero, by performing a drunken karaoke duet of “Careless Whisper.” At this point, the Waverider is more party bus than time machine.
6) Television’s first Muslim superhero
Super-hacker Zari Tomaz (Tala Ashe) is the one member of the team who doesn’t drink, because she is a practicing Muslim. That’s right: Perhaps the most jaw-dropping thing you can see on Legends of Tomorrow is an Iranian-American Muslim woman being treated like a normal person — albeit one who owns a magical amulet that lets her control air.
Even if Zari gets hangry during Ramadan, Islam is overall presented as a positive influence on her life, connecting her to her family and helping her stay grounded. Many American shows still struggle to acknowledge a religion that has 1.6 billion followers globally, but Legends of Tomorrow not only went there — it did so with purpose.
7) The Waverider has only one bathroom
At least nine people live on the Waverider, but they only have one bathroom. This isn’t really significant to the plot; I just can’t stop wondering how many hot-water-related stabbings they’ve had.
8) Still flirting their way through history
Sara Lance retired as the most legendary flirt in history when she started dating Ava Sharpe (Jes Macallan), a no-nonsense agent from the Time Bureau. But she passed the mantle to the Legends’ newest member, John Constantine (Matt Ryan, reprising his role from Constantine and Arrow). Constantine is bisexual, like Sara, and has been in comic books since 1992. In 2014, Daniel Cerone, executive producer of NBC’s Constantine, thought Constantine’s bisexuality could maybe happen on television “20 years from now”; Legends of Tomorrow executive producer Phil Klemmer must be from the future, then, because in 2017 he said Constantine would fit right in on the team as a “bisexual, world-weary demonologist.”
John Constantine wastes no time calling all the Legends “dishy,” flirting with Captain Cold’s gay doppelgänger Leo Snart (Wentworth Miller), hooking up with Sara in 1969, and kissing Time Bureau agent Gary Green (Adam Tsekhman), who, if he wasn’t interested in men before, probably is by the time he ends up in Aruba with Constantine. Someone has to be the team flirt, because besides Sara and Ava’s courtship, or Amaya and Nate’s doomed affair, the most action the rest of the team gets is reading Mick’s literary erotica.
9) They murdered the fourth wall in cold blood
While watching Lord of the Rings, the Legends notice that the actor who plays Denethor (John Noble) sounds very similar to the time demon they’re fighting, Mallus (voiced by John Noble). Not wanting to go through his agent, Ray sneaks onto the set of Lord of the Rings to get the actor John Noble (played here by the actor John Noble) to read lines he can use to trick Nora Darhk.
To his credit, John Noble doesn’t even step all the way out of his trailer for this scene. By the way, the episode is titled “Guest Starring John Noble.”
10) Beebo the god of war
Beebo is a less terrifying version of a Furby who’s introduced when a young Martin Stein (Graeme McComb) accidentally brings it back to Leif Erikson’s American settlement. The vikings love Beebo so much, it creates an alternate timeline where the Vikings conquered America. Beebo just has that effect on people.
When the Legends finally face Mallus head on, they must create a magical avatar to fight for them. Naturally, they choose Beebo as their champion, resulting in the most flat-out bananas fight scene the Arrowverse has ever produced:
It might help to remind you that they did come up with this plan while drunk.
All three seasons of Legends of Tomorrow are available to stream on Netflix.
