Legends of Tomorrow Review: Lowest Common Demoninator (Season 7 Episode 9)
Legends of Tomorrow Season 7 Episode 9, “Lowest Common Demoninator,” turns up the heat on the team as they find themselves in the midst of their own reality show.
Now in the midst of its seventh season, there aren’t many genre tropes that Legends of Tomorrow hasn’t taken a crack at over the years and this is but the latest one. Conceptually, doing a riff on reality television is the kind of episode that is glaringly obvious for this show’s particular brand of chaos.
In execution, it’s almost as good as that inherent promise. It’s actually walking a fairly decent line throughout this by neither punching up nor down on this type of tv. It’s a mishmash of a lot of different flavors of reality, spanning from Real Housewives to Jersey Shore and Survivor.
The jokes made at the genre’s expense are made in good faith and clearly with affection but it also isn’t glassy-eyed about the format. It is a critique of the way in which these shows are made. The episode isn’t shy about listing the intrusive and destructive methods behind the scenes that have real, lasting damages on the people being filmed.
Largely, this comes from Behrad towards the end of the episode with his impassioned disillusionment with having been filmed and replaced on their show as a younger person. This digs into his character in a way that Legends of Tomorrow sometimes forgets to do and also self-critiques the role that they’ve given him on the team.
From the start, he was slotted onto the Waverider as the chill, disaffected pothead and, for the most part, have left him in that space. Even after he died and came back, there wasn’t much growth to his character. He was and continues to be very static, who things kind of just happen to.
That being said, the show’s decision to pair off with Astra does not really work. It’s no fault of the two actors in question but they don’t really have any romantic chemistry together. It would be easy to see them as being familial or close friends but anything more than that doesn’t feel tangible at this point.
It’s all the more disappointing because Astra does have a viable ship with Spooner, who she actually does have a great deal of chemistry with, but the show is going away from that in favor of a more heteronormative and, frankly, boring ship.
Back to the big fun of the episode, however, the joy to be found here is the way that the cast is being allowed to crank everything up to eleven with these big, exaggerated performances that they reach so quickly and maintain throughout. Better than that is how perfectly the episode picks what reality trope for each character.
For instance, Nate being a buff Jersey Shore bro or Spooner deciding to play psychological warfare on everyone by always being naked or Sara doing a very good Real Housewives affectation. They are all just pitch-perfect and a complete understanding of the assignment.
This is a really fun episode for those really aware of the goings-on of reality television and people who only have a passing knowledge of all of this.
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 Wednesdays at 8/7c 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.