DC's Legends Of Tomorrow (CW, Thursdays 8 pm)
Greg Berlanti invested quite a bit of screentime on his two CW superhero shows, Arrow and The Flash, to introduce the cast of his new faux-Justice League mashup, DC's Legends of Tomorrow - perhaps to the detriment of those established shows. For fans of Marvel's Avengers, or DC fans thirsting for the upcoming Justice League film, Legends Of Tomorrow promises lots of action and plenty of characters, including former League of Assassins killer-turned-Black Canary Sara Lance (Caity Lotz,) reincarnated winged avengers Hawkman and Hawkgirl (Falk Hentschel and Ciara Renee,) former Superman Brandon Routh as The Atom, and Victor Garber and Franz Drameh as the two very different men (one an eminent scientist, the other a 20-something athlete) who combine their powers into Firestorm (DC's ripoff of the Human Torch.) Just to keep things interesting, the team also includes two supervillains, Dominic Purcell as the brutish Heat Wave and Wentworth Miller as the calculating Captain Cold. Even the series' bad guy, immortal villain Vandal Savage (Casper Crump) was introduced on a Flash/Arrow crossover arc.
This unlikely team has been recruited by Rip Hunter (Arthur Darvill,), a "Time Master" who's stolen a time machine to try and stop Vandal Savage from conquering the earth. It's hard to watch this and not think of Doctor Who (especially since Darvill's best known to American audiences primarily as Rory, companion to Matt Smith's 12th Doctor.) In fact, Rip Hunter was introduced in DC Comics several years before the Doctor's debut on the BBC, but most fans won't know that (or be familiar with the Rip Hunter character.) And Berlanti has done nothing to blunt the obvious comparisons: Rip Hunter's time machine is more Millennium Falcon than TARDIS, but for a show that's all about the future, the basic premise leans creakily on the familiar.
Hunter rounds up his league of heroes and bad guys and explains that they've left no mark on history; future generations remember none of them. By banding together to defeat Savage, they'll become.... legends. That prospect has obvious appeal to Sara Lance, Ray "Atom" Palmer, and Dr. Martin Stein, the 60-ish half of Firestorm. Firestorm's younger half needs more convincing, although he's eventually won over when the team selflessly bands together to defeat a time-traveling bounty hunter. And Hawkman and Hawkgirl have been murdered by Vandal Savage hundreds of time through history, through umpteen reincarnations, so they're naturally eager to end him. The bad guys have much murkier motives; Capt. Cold envisions using Rip's time machine to pillage history, stealing everything from the Mona Lisa to the Hope diamond, and Heat Wave is just along for the ride. So there's your chance for conflict within the team.
Of course, none of this holds up to logic, and as superheroes go, this bunch isn't all that super: The Atom has a super-suit, and Firestorm has real superpowers, while Hawkman and Hawkgirl can sprout wings and fly. But otherwise, their biggest "power" is clobbering people with a mace. Sara Lance doesn't have any powers at all, and Capt. Cold and Heat Wave are just hoodlums with fancy guns. (Why would you even want to get in bed with an unpredictable sociopath with a glorified flamethrower when you've already got Firestorm on the team? Seems a bit redundant.)
Another problem is that Arthur Darvill looks more like a guy named Rory than Rip; he was a terrific companion but you'd never cast him as the Doctor. Will he be believable keeping this volatile team on point and following orders?
And finally, there's simply the size of the cast. The closest comparison is probably Gotham, which tries to juggle a gallery of heroes and villains with mixed results. There's no successful template for a show about a team of superheroes; think of all the failed attempts to bring the Fantastic Four successfully to the screen, or the mixed results with the X-Men. Keeping all of Legend's characters involved will be challenging if not impossible. In the pilot, it often feels as if someone stood offscreen with a stopwatch and allowed every actor two minutes for character development before moving on to something else.
The premise of time travel - and setting each episode in another era, as the team tracks clues through time to find Savage's weaknesses - does have potential. In the pilot, there's a fight scene set in 1975 where "Love Will Keep Us Together" played on a jukebox that proved to be the liveliest and most entertaining set piece in the episode. If Berlanti and his writers can keep finding inventive ways to plop these characters in amusing situations, DC's Legends Of Tomorrow might find its footing.
And besides, we just learned there won't be a new episode of Doctor Who until the 2016 Christmas special. That's a long wait, so maybe fans will take their timey-wimey where they can get it.
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