“Legends of Tomorrow” shows promise

By Parker Sublette

Staff Writer

The first run of episodes for the new series “Legends of Tomorrow” shows promise as a fun, sci-fi, superhero series with an interesting premise and intriguing characters. However, “Legends of Tomorrow” lacks proper execution of said premise and it falls short in terms of dialogue depth.

The premise of “Legends of Tomorrow” is that an immortal tyrant named Vandal Savage is trying to conquer the earth by slowly amassing power over the course of history. In order to stop this, a time-travelling rogue from the future gathers a group of both heroes and villains to end Savage’s plans.

The show does an excellent job with its characters. The “good guys” are a team of two hawk-people from ancient Egypt, two master thieves with special weaponry, a highly trained assassin, a scientist and car-mechanic who together form a superhero, and the leader of the team who is a time-traveler from the future with a vendetta for the antagonist. The juxtaposition of heroes and villains working together against a greater evil provides for some memorable moments in the show and a constant source of drama.

“Legends of Tomorrow” is also an excellent nostalgia trip for comic book fans. The series brings together a cast of both well-known and lesser-known DC characters together in one group to fight one of the biggest bad-guys in all of comic books.

The premise of the show itself is an interesting one, but the writers have not used that to their advantage. With a plot centered around time-travel, much could be done, but so far the show and its characters have not left the 1970’s/80’s. As fun as this era is so much more could be accomplished through the series exploring different more interesting eras further in the past.

The show is five episodes in so far, and despite being about a quarter of the way through with the first season, it seems as though little to nothing has happened plot wise. In five episodes it has practically been the same thing each episode: the team hatches some plan to stop or slow Savage down, something goes wrong, they have to fix their mistake and end up back to square one. While it isn’t a horrible plot for an episode, five episodes of it can become tiring and repetitive.

As it is with many superhero shows, the series lacks depth in its dialogue. “Legends of Tomorrow” falls prey to cliche and simple writing in its dialogue. While one wouldn’t expect a comic book based show to have extremely thought-provoking and deep dialogue, it is disappointing to see that the writers did not even attempt fixing this.

All in all, “Legends of Tomorrow” is a great show to watch for comic book fans so long as one does not look for deeper meaning in it. It is a perfect show to watch while doing something else, because if you aren’t paying attention for a bit much won’t be missed.

“Legends of Tomorrow” airs on Thursdays on the CW at 5 p.m.