Distributor: Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
Episodes: 16
Duration: 42 min (per episode)
Legends of Tomorrow: Season 1 (Blu-ray) – Series Review
DC is putting on an offensive when it comes to their different action hero series, which tend to cross over into one another from time to time. This time it won’t be the bigshots like the Green Arrow, the Flash or Supergirl that will take the center stage, but a band of misfits, who try to do their best at becoming a notable superhero or villain, and try to become legends. Sadly, it seems that the group has joined under false pretenses, simply because they were so expandable for the sake of keeping the timeline unaltered in this time travelling adventure.
The year is 2166 and our blue planet has gone down the shitter, as Vandal Savage (Casper Crump) has taken over the Earth, safe for a few pockets of resistance. Nonetheless, the immortal miscreant, who has been gaining more and more power by killing the reincarnations of Hawkman, a.k.a. Carter Hall (Falk Hentschel) and Hawkgirl, a.k.a. Kendra Saunders (Ciara Renée) for centuries on end, is slowly eradicating said forces of the rebellion. When Rip Hunter’s (Arthur Darvill) family gets murdered by the evil overlord, he calls upon his fellow Time Masters, to alter the course of history and erase Vandal Savage from existence, before it comes to the end of this planet. As expected, the order declines, as they don’t interfere in these so-called ‘trivial matters’ and this makes Rip go rogue. Rip decides to head back to 2016, to gather a ragtag group of special people from our time, to accompany him on his journey throughout the ages, to stop Vandal Savage once and for all. The team consists out of Hawkman, Hawkgirls, Sara Lance (Caity Lotz), Ray Palmer (Brandon Routh), Dr. Martin Stein (Victor Garber), Jefferson Jackson (Franz Drameh) and surprisingly, the two criminals Leonard Snart (Wentworth Miller) and Mick Rory (Dominic Purcell). Rip shows them a glimpse of what our planet will become in a mere century and a half, and the team agrees to join him on his crusade.
While the first mission doesn’t exactly go as planned, they find out that Rip has been lying to them, and that they weren’t asked to join his team because they were ‘legends’ in the future, but simply because the timeline would remain intact, be it with them dead or not, which means they have no impact on how our planet will look like in the future, as they are pretty much forgotten instantly. That being said, even though they are already being hunted by the rest of the Time Council, they agree to follow Rip, as this would actually become their biggest chance of both saving the world and perhaps going down the history books.
Truth be told, if you have seen Arrow, The Flash and Supergirl, or simply only one of those, you can easily predict the overall flow of this series. True, the time travelling aspect and the new lead characters hold a few tricks up their sleeves, but overall the creators remain faithful to the ‘one villain’ per story arc format. Nonetheless, while this may sound like everything will become bland and boring throughout the series, you’re duly mistaken, as most episodes hold a fairly high amusement factor, and the red thread that runs through said episodes is quite interesting.
Most of the cast members have already proved their worth in The Flash or Arrow, and thus there is nothing more to say than that the cast does a superb job. Nonetheless, the most interesting newcomers were Arthur Darvill, who played Captain Rip Hunter, and Casper Crump, who played Vandal Savage, with the latter already having received a bit of screentime in the crossover between The Flash and Arrow. Both actors play their roles superbly, and it’s quite convincing as to how they hate each others’ guts equally.
This series only suffers from one annoying problem, which has become rather apparent in the later seasons of Arrow as well, namely a fairly big amount of unbelievable fights. Not only does a professionally trained army constantly miss its opponents, the effects are sometimes inexplicably ‘cheap’, which is rather strange for a franchise that his a huge following.
While the list of special features isn’t precisely awestrucking on this Blu-ray release of the first season of Legends of Tomorrow, most add a fun touch to the whole. You’ll get the typical Comic-Con Panel and the Gag Reel, but also a few snippets about the vessel the time travelers spend their time on, The Waverider, a few insights on how the creators combined fiction with facts and last but not least, a short featurette about another DC character, Jonah Hex.
Conclusion
Legends of Tomorrow: Season 1 is certainly worth the watch if you want to see some of your favorite characters from the other DC series finally take up leading roles. Not only is it clear that this series was made in the same format as other similar series such as Arrow, The Flash and Supergirl, it tries its best to incorporate said series, by using cast members that are the leading figures in their respective series, and use them as side-characters in this one. Even though our socks weren’t blown off completely, simply because of the familiarity and similarity with the other series, thus rending this a bit as a ‘been-there-done-that’ experience, we still enjoyed these first sixteen episodes of Legends of Tomorrow. We are quite curious to see how this one evolves in the future.
Legends of Tomorrow: Season 1 (Blu-ray) - Series Review,
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