LEGENDS OF TOMORROW‘s destiny as the goofball discard pile of CW’s DC/Greg Berlanti universe may have reached its apotheosis with tonight’s Season 3 finale, written by co-creator/Executive Producers Matt Guggenheim and Phil Klemmer. It featured a family-sized box of former series regulars and guest stars from throughout the run of the series, but its true WTF achievement came at the climax. Our current gang of heroes (the show’s regular cast has had more changes in 3 seasons than SVU has had in 19) realized that their only hope of defeating the season’s Big Bad, the demon Mallus, was in pooling together the power of their totems to create their own group entity, but instead of a powerful super-being, what emerged was a giant blue plush toy named Beebo, who literally hugged Mallus to death (and who was promptly worshipped by some of the supporting villains as a god).
The heroic warlock John Constantine (Matt Ryan, newly appointed a series regular for Season 4) appeared at the end to tell our heroes that their work wasn’t done because Mallus wasn’t the only demon freed from the Netherworld, but really, how do you top that? After a relatively serious initial season, Legends became the most proudly ramshackle of the Berlanti-verse superhero series, where plot points are jumbled and reshuffled by the week (some rifts in time are crises that must be instantly fixed lest the world be destroyed, while others are tolerated and even indulged), and the cast as well as the tone of the show are in constant flux.
Season 3’s revolving door alone saw the seemingly random arrival of Kid Flash (Keiynan Lonsdale), along with the departure of Firestorm (Victor Garber and Franz Drameh, although the latter returned for the finale) and Leonard Snart (Wentworth Miller), with the finale also bidding farewell to Amaya Jiwe (Maisie Richardson-Sellers). Season 4’s regulars will include not just Constantine, but Ava Sharpe (Jes Macallan), a clone who’s also the lover of Captain Sara Lance (Caity Lotz).
It would be too much to expect Legends of Tomorrow to hold together–it doesn’t–but in comparison to the gloomy mythology of Timeless, network TV’s other time-travel saga, Legends‘ almost vaudevillian sensibility can be rather charming: if you don’t enjoy a tinny joke, silly bit of plotting or tacky set, just wait and another will replace it. One recent episode featured the heroes realizing that the voice of Mallus sounded like the actor John Noble (which made sense, since he provides the creature’s voice), so they recruited him from the set of Lord of the Rings to dub the monster–and then the show itself, in a memorable meta touch, titled the episode “Guest Starring John Noble.”
The Season 3 finale was a celebration of more for more’s sake (due credit to director Dermott Downs, who had to orchestrate the lunacy, as well as the no-doubt complicated logistics of the huge guest star cast), and as long as you didn’t take any of it seriously, it delivered some heartwarming moments and a few furtive giggles.
Legends is one of the lower-rated of the DC series, but its numbers are still decent by CW standards, and as noted, Season 4 is already in the works. Its threadbare, sometimes bizarre achievements aren’t the stuff of Prestige TV, but they do have their moments.
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