Created by: Greg Berlanti, Andrew Kreisberg & Marc Guggenheim

Premieres: Thursday, January 21st @ 8:00 PM

Two episodes watched for review

“Time changes. People don’t.”

The superhero team comic is a slippery breed, especially the kind that stuff a dozen or so characters alongside a sizeable helping of portent. Take Jonathan Hickman’s recent run on Avengers and New Avengers at Marvel: while good as a whole, the worst bits floated to the surface whenever Hickman looked to appease all bases at once. Much better were the issues that trained their focus on individuals or pairs, and showed how ripples could ebb outward toward the others in the group. Though a different medium (and publisher), DC’s Legends of Tomorrow suffers from too much of the former and little of the rich, textured material necessary to make this a vital work.

And Legends of Tomorrow is dense, with reams of material and characters to work through in its two-hour pilot. That strain shows from the beginning: Rip Hunter (Arthur Darvill) pleas for help from the Time Masters in the 22nd century in an attempt to stop Earth’s new overlord Vandal Savage (Casper Crump). In order to accomplish this goal, he ventures into the past and picks up a team assembled from Arrow and The Flash supporting players. Their ranks are introduced through a rather sloppy montage, which ultimately makes the right call to rip off the exposition band-aid. Or so it seems at first, as the first act of the first hour has neatly assembled the crew and prepared them for their mission. Unfortunately, the need to explain carries through the initial episodes, ranging from dredging up conflict from previous shows to overly-cute jokes popped in for regular viewers.

This kind of problem stems almost exclusively from the franchise-fever that has wormed its way from film to television over the past few years. Of course crossover events are tried and true on the small screen, but this kind of synergy forces Legends of Tomorrow to serve too many masters. It must not just entice those channel-surfing, but pay constant homage to Flash and Arrow. That leads to an array of info-dumps looking to bring the audience up to speed with the slightest wink left over for those already in the know.

This may be, and hopefully is, an early-goings issue. The Flash, too, suffers in episodes where it must do more than tell a story for story’s sake. Look at “The Fury of Firestorm” which introduced Jax (Franz Drameh) as a new partner for Martin Stein (Victor Garber). That installment was a clunky mess in the middle of a show that often knows how to balance candy-coated fun and emotional stability better than most other shows on television. So there’s a chance that post-introductions, Legends of Tomorrow will find its legs and find a better way to deepen all of the present characters.

There are signs that this may happen, especially a handful of action sequences that thrillingly sweep along mayhem like a thrashing landscape painting. These scenes manage to capture the interplay between the characters well enough, and occasionally feature bursts of fantastic fight choreography (especially when Caity Lotz’s White Canary is involved). And some characters are ported over so well from their original programs that their interplay is more developed than the world around them. This is mainly true for Captain Cold (Wentworth Miller) and Heat Wave (Dominic Purcell), without question the central reason to pay attention to the series. Miller’s Cold is one of the great TV villain performances, the actor chomping through every line like gristle, his eyebrows constantly on high alert. His interplay with the bulkier Purcell has always been a highlight of The Flash and that remains true here.

Yet beyond those bright spots, Legends of Tomorrow comes across as far too cluttered to function properly. Even a plot devoted to character development, in the second hour, is only enjoyable for a minute before it becomes yet another cog in the overarching mythology’s machine. The emotional climax hits like a thud because there’s too much else going on and nobody seems to care much about this anyway so why should the audience? The best scene is one that has nothing to do with plot mechanics: a bar brawl featuring Canary, Cold and Heat Wave in the 1970’s. It helps that these are the three standout cast members, but it’s also allowed to be a fun sequence, not weighted down by bland talk of destiny and purpose. All of those larger themes could become interesting, but for now they reek of writers needing to make the show feel big rather than simply letting it build organically. As DC’s Legends of Tomorrow continues down the path towards its big bad, hopefully it will remember to set aside moments such as these and let the characters, and audience, breathe. If everything stopped calling attention to how important it was, maybe something actually could be.

Grade: C+