Legends of Tomorrow Review: Meet the Legends (Season 5 Episode 2)
Legends of Tomorrow kicks off the season in earnest on Season 5 Episode 2, “Meet the Legends,” with a documentary crew in tow and an escaped soul to hunt.
Every new season of Legends of Tomorrow takes a season-long slant that will propel it into the tomfoolery that the series is so well known for at this point. For example, the third season had historical figures displaced throughout time, and the fourth went fully mystical with creatures escaped from hell.
This fifth season seems to be a riff on that where some of the worst people in history have been sent back up to their bodies and are now essentially immortal. It’s a fun concept and, if “Meet the Legends” is any indication, this is going to get very weird, even by Legends of Tomorrow standards.
Ultimately, that’s what the show is constantly working towards.
It takes these little plot devices and engineers them in such a way that allows the show to go in the craziest direction imaginable for the characters to respond to. For instance, how would it go if these characters discovered a Beebo doll being worshipped by Vikings? After that, you’re off to the races.
The thing with Legends of Tomorrow is that it does episodes that the rest of the Arrowverse could never dream of doing. Even The Flash, in its occasional weirdness, couldn’t do an episode as weird as Gorilla Grodd attacking a young Barack Obama. It’s a show so wonderfully off-kilter and out of step with the other shows.
“Meet the Legends” is in many ways a direct response to that difference. The urge to homogenize all of the shows is an all too real one, but what makes this show so special is that it has always done its own thing, with little to no regard for what the rest of the universe is up to.
The meta aspects of this episode are rather strong — and sometimes it threads the line of fan service — but it largely works. Legends of Tomorrow is never a show that brings in a decent audience and survives at this point by the fervor of its fans and the high praise of critics.
The pressure that must exist for this to be more in line with the rest of the Arrowverse, and less strange overall, must be immense but that is not now nor has it ever been what this show is. This is the show that has always made big swings, be them good or bad.
Another show would not have had The Atom go inside the indestructible villain and blow him to pieces. It’s audacious and no sane writer’s room would ever dare to do it, which is what makes it the perfect Legends of Tomorrow move.
This is all backdropped really nicely by a documentary crew coming onto the Waverider and the Legends feeling this pressure to be less eccentric, more accessible, in order to have funding for their shenanigans. It is by no means a subtle parallel but a fun one all the same.
This is also contrasted by Sara and her desire to actually talk about what happened during the crossover. It’s a welcome carryover from “Crisis on Infinite Earths: Part Five,” which really reckons with the character progression of her character since her days on Arrow and the extent to which she is really comfortable talking about her emotions with her little found family.
It’s still the same directness that we’d expect from Sara but utilized in a different way now.
If this is more of what we’ll be getting with the rest of this season, then this will be a wonderfully weird run of episodes of an already deeply insane series.
What did you think of this episode of Legends of Tomorrow? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Legends of Tomorrow airs Tuesdays at 9/8c on The CW.
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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.