First Impressions: DC’s Legends of Tomorrow

Usually when you’re headhunted for a new job, you’ll get a call from a high-powered recruitment consultant, have a few meetings (hopefully at wine bar somewhere) and seal the deal with handshakes and a band spanking new contract.

If you’re one of the heroes or villains recruited by a time-travelling maverick, Rip Hunter (Arthur Darvill) however, the hiring process is an altogether different undertaking, marked by an unexpected meeting, a hurried pitch about history, the universe and life as we know it being in danger, unconsciousness and an awakening atop a skyscraper.

Doesn’t sound like your usual job interview does it? But then the mix of people Hunter hurriedly recruits in his quest to stop an 4000 year-old immortal dictatorial conqueror, Vandal Savage (Casper Crump) from taking over the world in 2166, are hardly your run-of-the-mill unwilling applicants.

For a start two of Hunter’s would-be dictator-stopping, time-travelling recruits often inhabit the same fiery body. Firestorm, introduced in The Flash, another part of DC’s ever-growing television empire, is made up of learned, somewhat stuffy Professor Martin Stein (Victor Garber) and 20 year old sassy street kid Jefferson Jackson (Franz Drameh), who have finally come to some accommodation about being the same supernatural entity but can’t quite agree on whether they should accept Hunter’s highly unorthodox offer.

Other recurring characters from The Flash also find themselves in the selection pool – villains Leonard Snart / Captain Cold (Wentworth Miller) and Mick Rory / Heat Wave (Dominic Purcell), who naturally see the time lord’s offer as an opportunity to pillage and steal on a vast chronological scale, and Chay-Ara / Kendra Saunders / Hawkgirl (Ciara Renée) and Khufu / Carter Hall / Hawkman (Falk Hentschel), ancient Egyptian contemporaries of Savage, whose life forces (they die over and over and over again) are forever linked to him.

Rounding out this unorthodox grouping are Sara Lance / White Canary (Caity Lotz), introduced in Arrow, and Ray Palmer / Atom (Brandon Routh) who supply some street smarts and gee-whiz derring-do respectively.

Not quite the superhero team that central casting might have ordered but as Hunter makes clear he isn’t after the usual mix of people, seeking instead people who are nobodies, as he describes him, who will have minimum effect on the time line if left to their own devices.

Way to win them over Rip!

Fortunately, Mr Hunter, who is played with charming roguishness by Doctor Who‘s Arthur Darvill, who’s given far more room to stretch his acting legs in DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, doesn’t stop there, telling his sceptically involuntary crew that here’s their chance to make a profound impact on history, to be remembered as the saviours of the human race.

(Although to be fair, Rip, if you and your team stop Savage from fulfilling his evil plan, and humanity ambles on unaffected, no one’s going to know who they are anyway; sensibly he left this out of his hastily-delivered sales spiel.)

Now you’d think that people like Firestorm and the Captain Cold might put up a fight and not agree to go along with the sort of over the top pitch Hunter is making, and to an extent they do, but thanks to the pressing needs of introducing a large number of characters in a finite-sized pilot, everyone agrees fairly readily to joining Hunter’s quest to stop Savage dead in his time-travelling tracks.

It’s one of the only weak parts of what is a briskly put together pilot script, one that gets things moving, introduces us to all the people we need to know,  and gives us equal measure of action, character moments, grit and charm in equal measure.

The other downside are the extensive action sequences which seem to go on far too long at the expense of actually getting somewhere, squashing some of the narrative into some rushed and half-baked scenes.

Yes we have heroes fighting a villain to stop humanity being killed and enslaved so a certain number of fights are to be expected but in one episode three major bouts of fisticuffs take place and unless you’re in love with full-on fight sequences, you might find the ongoing physical argy-bargy all a bit too much.

But by and large, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow works and works well, a riotously fun boys-and-girls own adventure that knows its outrageously over the top and has a great deal of it.

In the first two episodes, “Pilot, part 1” and “Pilot, part 2” on which this reveiw is based – yep they didn’t used their budget on brilliantly clever names for the eps folks – we’re treated to fun 1975 fashion, characters meeting their former selves and some fun commentary on the ethics and ins-and-outs of time travel.

The thing to remember is that the show is not clearly seeking to be an overly authentic rendering of the periods in which they land; throw some period clothes on the characters (the more archetypal the better), find a building from the time and have some fun.

If you’re expecting an excruciatingly accurate History channel expose of say 1975, then DC’s Legends of Tomorrow likely isn’t for you.

But if you’re happy to spend some time with an eclectic fun of flawed, conflicted characters, all of whom are broad brush strokes at first, but will likely be filled in by degrees as the show goes along – it helps that we met many of the characters in the lead-up to this show’s launch – and love an endlessly malleable narrative with tongue often very firmly in cheek much of the time, then you’ll find a lot to like in DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, which like other chrono-warping shows that have preceded it, will likely make merry with the many time periods and dramatic possibilities at their disposal.