“DC’s Legends of Tomorrow” Season One Review: A Highly Creative Superhero Mashup

Season One of Legends of Tomorrow gets a lot of hate, and I understand why. It’s tonally choppy, overloaded with characters, the villain is boring and cliché, and it has to make everything up as it goes along due to a lack of source material (one of the biggest differences from the other CW superhero series). But I’m willing to forgo those shortcomings, and in this review I’ll explain why.

Conceived as a spinoff of The Flash and Arrow (the prominent two Arrowverse series at the time), Legends of Tomorrow introduces Rip Hunter (Arthur Darvill), a Time Master from the 22nd century. Hunter forms a team of B-list superheroes to take down Vandal Savage (frequent guest star Casper Crump), an immortal tyrant who eventually conquers the world and murders Hunter’s wife and son. He recruits them with the promise that, in the future, they will be remembered as not just heroes, but “legends.” That’s enough for (most of) them.