Legends of Tomorrow: What I Learned About Story Teams from Season One

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I often learn more from failed stories than from successful ones, but I wasn’t thinking of that when I binge-watched the first season of Legends of Tomorrow this past weekend, I just wanted to catch up to Season Two. What I discovered was that there’s an excellent team buried in the character-and-plot-salad of this show. SPOILERS AHEAD.

So this show, for those of you who don’t follow the CW, is part of the Arrowverse that includes Arrow, Flash, and now Supergirl. If you want your comic book shows, the CW has you covered. Legends of Tomorrow, however, was pretty clearly designed by a committee who said, “Let’s cash in on the success of the DC shows we already have. And then add some Doctor Who while we’re at it.”

So we get Time Lord Master Rip Hunter (your tough hero in the duster coat) who gathers together a ragtag band of criminals and superheroes to travel across time in the time ship called the Tardis Waverider to fight the most dangerous man in the universe, Vandal Savage (because the name “Evil Badguy” was too on-the-nose). Rip Hunter vs. Vandal Savage was enough of a clue that this was going to be a disaster, but I watched the first couple of episodes anyway because they had three of my favorite characters in them.

Unfortunately, Rip enlists eight characters.

Let us pause for a moment to consider the trope of the Five Man Band, the classic story team dynamic, five characters with co-ordinating skills who work together to Get Things Done. Why five? Because eight is too damn many. I’d argue three works even better, but I’ve seen Leverage, so five can be outstanding, too, as long as they have complementary skills. Remember the Leverage pilot? We start with Nate the Mastermind, and then show him working with three of his new team, the hacker, the hitter, and the thief, and then we add Sophie, the grifter. Each member of the team was introduced so skillfully that we never got them confused, and they were shown from the very beginning learning to interact with each other. The last scene of the pilot is the rest of the team trying to convince Nate to keep them a team because they’re (very slowly) learning the joy of working together. So Leverage introduced and began to bond five characters in a pilot that ran fifty-seven minutes.

The Legends pilot introduced nine recurring characters (the team and Rip plus Vandal Badguy), six of whom have superpowers and strangling back stories in forty-four minutes. Forget foreshadowing bonding, they barely had time to show all the characters and their skills. And unfortunately, five of the characters were . . . flawed.

Rip recruits the multi-reincarnated Egyptian princess Hawkgirl (who has amnesia) and Hawkman (who’s trying to convince her they’re destined to be lovers and therefore comes off as Creepy Winged Stalker); theirs is the great love story except the whole thing is a big block of embarrassingly bad cheese. Plus they’re caught in a love triangle with Vandal Savage, who has killed them two hundred and six times. Seriously, two hundred and six times. As Jack Burton would say, ”C’mon, Dave, you’re doing something seriously wrong.” (My favorite Hawk moment is when the two of them take wing and Mick Rory, another member of the team, says, “Every time they do that, I get hungry for chicken.”}

Then Rip recruits Stein and Jax, a physicist and a garage mechanic who become a single human fireball when they clasp hands and who bicker annoyingly the rest of the time. He also recruits billionare super scientist Ray Palmer, who at least has a goofy charm, but that’s undercut by his self-doubts and his terrible romantic choices (not the Hawk, Ray, anybody but the Hawk). These three are not the dealbreakers that the Hawks are, but they’re not particularly fun to watch, either.

But the big problem is that these five people are only a team because Rip says they’re a team. There’s no hitter/hacker/thief meshing-skills dynamic here. The Hawks can fly but so can Firestorm. Stein, the genius half of Firestorm, can invent things in minutes, but so can Ray Palmer, who can shrink himself down to The Atom, and who can also fly (and suddenly the total uselessness of the Hawk people becomes clear.) More than that, they never develop relationships outside of their pairs, so they’re never really a team, more just people working next to each other. If it had just been these guys, I wouldn’t have made it through the first five minutes of Episode One.

But Rip also recruits a “killer, klepto, pyro” trio of criminals who not only are not duplicates of any of the others, they don’t even have superpowers.

Mick Rory initially seems to be just a surly pyromaniac thug with “the IQ of meat” and the best blunt force one-liners on TV, but Dominic Purcell foreshadows from the beginning that there is more lurking beneath the thick skull, and the character’s arc throughout the first season is a beautiful thing without ever becoming maudlin or even overt.

Leonard Snart is a master thief and the brains of the Snart\Rory criminal duo. You know writers have lost control of their naming skills when “Rip Hunter” turns out to be a weak dupe and “Leonard Snart” becomes a mythic hero. Wentworth Miller’s Snart is a masterpiece of amoral cunning behind hooded eyes and a mannered snarl. Plus Miller and Purcell have practiced their buddy bit through five seasons of Prison Break, so their timing never misses. The Hawks were the couple I was supposed to care about, but Leonard and Mick’s partnership breakup was the one that kept me hoping that these two crazy kids could make it work again.

Sara Lance was not my favorite character on Arrow, but even I had to admit she’d been through a lot: shipwrecked while cheating with her sister’s boyfriend, captured and made a lab slave to a madman, rescued by the daughter of the head of the League of Assasins and indoctrinated into their cult to become a master killer, recruited to join the Green Arrow as the vigilante Black Canary, murdered by her best friend, resurrected by her sister in the Lazarus Pit with its accompanying blood lust problem, and now chosen to roam the universe to fight Vandal Whatsis. Sara has issues but she handles them with deadpan aplomb: She’s tough, she’s smart, she’s thoughtful, she’s cautious, and she’s the antithesis of the Fridged Girlfriend trope. Plus she’s a lesbian (although she went bi for the Arrow and, it appears, is willing to again for Leonard Snart if she ever gets the chance) who has a couple of very nice if brief love scenes with a fifties nurse and the Queen of France. Last season’s TV in general had a kill-the-lesbian problem, but it’s a fairly safe bet that Legends won’t join the crowd because having been dead once, Sara’s not going back. And finally, Caity Lotz started out as a dancer and has training in martial arts and parkour, all of which gives the character a physicality that reinforces her feminist strength.

The three aren’t a team in the beginning: Sara meets Mick and Rory in the pilot. But when Rip lands the time-ship in 1975 and tells them to stay on board because their skills aren’t needed (“Meaning,” Leonard says, “you don’t need anybody killed, maimed, or robbed”), they ignore him to find a bar and kick back:

I’m not a fan of fight scenes in general, but I love the way this one foreshadows the team dynamics, especially the men not leaping to intervene in Sara’s fight but responding when she says, “Now.” And it’s not just the relationship of the triad as a whole, it’s the pairs that develop within that relationship throughout the season, the way Mick acknowledges Sara as an equal and respects her, the way Mick and Leonard share a brotherhood that goes deep, the way the respect and connection between Sara and Leonard created a subtext that launched a thousand ‘ships.

The strength of this team is heightened by the ridiculousness of the Big Bad they’re fighting. Vandal Savage would have been an uphill climb to take seriously without the dumb name, but he cackles evilly across time while Rip seethes and Hawkgirl weeps. Meanwhile Savage and Leonard come face to face with this dialogue:

Savage: Who are you to stand against me, Vandal Savage, Destroyer of Empires!

Leonard: Leonard Snart, Robber of ATMs.

The trio do take him seriously enough to help the team finally kill Savage, but the real climax isn’t taking down the antagonist Rip’s been ineptly leading them against, but the stand at the end against the Time Masters who have been conspiring against them. Somebody’s going to die, and Ray, Mick, and Leonard all put themselves in danger when the chips are down, Goofy and two thieves coming through to save the future. (I’m a little annoyed at who died, but since death is only an inconvenience in the Arrowverse, and that actor just signed a contract to appear on all the DC CW shows, I’ll get over it.)

And so here is what I learned:

1. Name your characters carefully. They were stuck with Leonard Snart from the comics, but the actor was so good he overcame the name. NOBODY could live up to names like Rip Hunter and Vandal Savage; I’m surprised they weren’t begging to be put down.

2. Keep your team small–five is good, three is better—and make sure they have different skills that complement one another: Mastermind, Grifter, Hacker, Hitter, Thief is good, and it turns out that Killer, Klepto, Pyro is fun.

3. Use dialogue for banter, planning, and warning. Stop talking about your feelings. Stating once that your family is dead is sufficient. Keep your uncertainty about your self-worth to yourself, especially if you’re a genius billionaire.

4. Show Your Team’s Bond With Each Other; Don’t Tell. In the bar scene, Mick and Leonard drinking beer while Sara fights is a sign of their respect, much more powerful than any “Sara, I really respect you” dialogue; the fact that they never take their eyes off her is a show of back-up at the ready (and possibly lust on Leonard’s part, but he’s so laid back he’s not going to make a move for weeks, so possibly not).

I’m definitely in for Season Two, at least for awhile. For one thing, Sara’s the captain of the ship now, and I’m loving that. And while the history is suspect in this show, the different eras are fun if only for the sets and costumes (the Old West was a blast except for Hawkgirl’s extended dialogue with herself about her relationships). Plus our dead hero is coming back as a bad guy in Episode Eight, which I hope will be short-lived. If Sara’s willing to switch teams for him, he should certainly be willing to switch teams for her, plus there’s his buddy Mick who crossed over from the dark side for him. Debts must be paid. But what I’m really hoping for is that Ray stops staring at his navel and discussing his feelings with it, that Stein and Jax will stop sniping at each other like a not-amusing Odd Couple, and that the team can finally bond. They lost the Hawks, so that’s a step in the right direction, but then they added two more characters, one of which seems to be Another Ninja Girl and the other of which is Another Goofy, so I have strong misgivings. On the other hand, two female ninjas was really fun to watch:

Now I have to go look at Nita’s team, which is way over five characters, and start thinking things through. And I have to get a stronger antagonist. I think I’ll call her Vandella Rabid . . .

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