Spoilers DC's Legends of Tomorrow - Season 2
- Thread starter Commander Richard
- Start date
Yes she most certainly did!!
What struck me the most is that they landed in L.A. and not another fictitious DC Comics city.
LA X.
LA X.
It's their second visit to LA -- they were there in the '60s in the George Lucas episode. But it is pretty unusual to see a real US city in the present day in the Arrowverse.
Hmm... The FX team for these shows has a digital model of the LA skyline which they use for National City in Supergirl, for all the shots of Supergirl flying through the city and such. I wonder if they chose LA because it let them reuse that cityscape model as the basis for their time-warped city shot, instead of having to build an entirely new one.
This is wishful thinking, but one could possibly take it as a hint that the LA-set Black Lightning series (if it gets picked up -- it's still just in pilot phase) could be set on Earth-1.
This was a better episode than Doomworld right up until the end, when the same problems that dragged down that episode as far as its plausibility and ability for The Flash and Arrow to coexist with it are concerned popped up again, which is contrary to what a lot of people who were arguing with me over my issues with Doomworld had been saying was going to happen. It also doesn't help that the ending was so random.I
I intend to buy this season of Legends on DVD, but it's not looking likely that it'll be something I watch from beginning to end due to how problematic and nonsensical - in terms of Arrow and The Flash's ability to coexist with it - its overall narrative ended up being.
I intend to buy this season of Legends on DVD, but it's not looking likely that it'll be something I watch from beginning to end due to how problematic and nonsensical - in terms of Arrow and The Flash's ability to coexist with it - its overall narrative ended up being.
^ The shows have to be able to coexist because they share the same reality. Coexisting, BTW, has nothing to do with crossover or intersectionality; it's about not doing things on one show that make it fundamentally impossible for the other shows to happen without major "handwavium" and hoop-jumping .
Let me give you a hypothetical example of what I'm talking about and why it's such a problem.
Flash back to the 90s with me and assume that Star Trek TNG and Star Trek DS9 were still overlapping when the Dominion War storyline was happening. Now assume that TNG was either completely ignoring the fact that the Dominion War was happening or else telling stories that slightly referenced the Dominion War but were still contradictory to that storyline as far as the state of the galaxy in the Alpha, Beta, and Gamma Quadrants was concerned, thereby "breaking the universe" and making it impossible for DS9's narrative to be taken seriously.
The fact that Arrow, The Flash, and Legends all exist - and are all direct spinoffs of one another - means that they have to be able to CO-EXIST, which, as noted above, means not doing things on one series that make it impossible for the others to continue to exist narratively, even if they only minimally intersect or crossover directly.
Let me give you a hypothetical example of what I'm talking about and why it's such a problem.
Flash back to the 90s with me and assume that Star Trek TNG and Star Trek DS9 were still overlapping when the Dominion War storyline was happening. Now assume that TNG was either completely ignoring the fact that the Dominion War was happening or else telling stories that slightly referenced the Dominion War but were still contradictory to that storyline as far as the state of the galaxy in the Alpha, Beta, and Gamma Quadrants was concerned, thereby "breaking the universe" and making it impossible for DS9's narrative to be taken seriously.
The fact that Arrow, The Flash, and Legends all exist - and are all direct spinoffs of one another - means that they have to be able to CO-EXIST, which, as noted above, means not doing things on one series that make it impossible for the others to continue to exist narratively, even if they only minimally intersect or crossover directly.
I guess we just have to pretend that the other shows take place in the reality that will eventually be restored once the Legends fix things. Since they're time travelers, their storyline doesn't have to be in sync with the others.
After all, in a sense, that's been the assumption all season. Thawne removing Damien, Malcolm, and Snart from their respective pasts should have undone the entire continuity of the Arrowverse, but it didn't, because the Legends were "destined" to eventually return them to their proper places and times and wipe their memories. So all along, we've been watching the timeline that would eventually exist once the Legends put things right, but we had to wait until last night to see them actually take the action that preserved that timeline.
Although I'm not convinced they will entirely fix this new problem. I read an interview with Phil Klemmer where he talked about how the Legends are their own worst enemies:
So my guess is, season 3 will be about the Legends trying to fix the damage caused by the "time storm" they created. Probably there will be aberrations/anachronisms throughout history and they'll have to chase them down and try to restore history to its proper path. Kind of like the stupid old '80s show Voyagers!, except with an actual explanation for why history is off course.
By the way... I found it odd that Blake Neely scored Rip Hunter's departure scene with his Hawkgirl/Hawkman theme. That's one of his best character motifs, so it was great to hear it again, but it was incongruous to hear it used for Rip.
After all, in a sense, that's been the assumption all season. Thawne removing Damien, Malcolm, and Snart from their respective pasts should have undone the entire continuity of the Arrowverse, but it didn't, because the Legends were "destined" to eventually return them to their proper places and times and wipe their memories. So all along, we've been watching the timeline that would eventually exist once the Legends put things right, but we had to wait until last night to see them actually take the action that preserved that timeline.
Although I'm not convinced they will entirely fix this new problem. I read an interview with Phil Klemmer where he talked about how the Legends are their own worst enemies:
So my guess is, season 3 will be about the Legends trying to fix the damage caused by the "time storm" they created. Probably there will be aberrations/anachronisms throughout history and they'll have to chase them down and try to restore history to its proper path. Kind of like the stupid old '80s show Voyagers!, except with an actual explanation for why history is off course.
By the way... I found it odd that Blake Neely scored Rip Hunter's departure scene with his Hawkgirl/Hawkman theme. That's one of his best character motifs, so it was great to hear it again, but it was incongruous to hear it used for Rip.
Does this mean this season only has 17 episodes? Sara-2 could not have made a better decision than to depower the Spear of Destiny. And I liked the brief moment she shared with Laurel. At first I wasn't sure what fantasy-Laurel's motives were: either to tempt Sara-2 to shape reality to her own liking or to convince her to do the right thing, which was what Sara-2 decided to do. I knew the crew wouldn't just end up in 2017 Aruba; there had to be a consequence to their actions back in 1916.
For a second there I thought they did crash into National City, and were going to spend next season on Earth-38, which could have been kind of cool.
But that's not nearly an equivalent scope/situation.
The closest Star Trek example would be if DS9 ignored the temporal manipulations during the VOY "Year of Hell" two-parter. Which they did...
Yep.
The fact that this even has to be considered is a problem.
I'm not even going to bother watching the remainder of The Flash and Arrow's current seasons, and won't be watching them or Legends next season. The entire Earth-1 segment of the Arrowverse has been fundamentally broken, and in a way that can't be fixed.
You're overreacting.
No, I'm not.
The chances of The Flash and Arrow's remaining episodes being in any way affected by the Legends "breaking time" is slim to none, which is why the E1 portion of the Arrowverse is now fundamentally broken.
If the end result of a group of time travelers is to fix the problems so that they never happened, then the remainder of Flash and Arrow's seasons are not broken. Those two shows cannot-and should not interrupt their own storylines to present the altered realities caused by the Legends.
If it makes it any easier for you to reconcile matters, remember that LoT is the spin off of Arrow, and the parent show's narrative will always come first.
If it makes it any easier for you to reconcile matters, remember that LoT is the spin off of Arrow, and the parent show's narrative will always come first.
Why is it so difficult for people to understand that it is fundamentally impossible for time to be broken on Legends and simultaneously unbroken on The Flash and Arrow?
Because it's time travel, so the very concept of "simultaneous" is inapplicable. It's not like we haven't seen non-linear storytelling before, like the Flash breaching to Earth-38 in "Worlds Finest" three weeks before we saw him create the breach in "Versus Zoom." Or having Barry show up with superspeed at Laurel's funeral during a time when he was powerless on his own show. In those case, obviously the episodes did not air in the same order in which they took place. In-story simultaneity does not have to correspond to release-date simultaneity. And that's doubly the case when one of the stories involved is a time-travel narrative.
The entirety of Legends' third season is not going to take place out-of-sync with Arrow Season 6 and The Flash Season 4, which is what would need to happen in order for this to even remotely make sense.
It's also fundamentally narratively impossible for the "time travel" excuse to actually mean something in-universe due to the way that all 3 of the E1 Arrowverse series have DEALT with the concept of time travel and its "ripple effects".
Legends didn't just have its characters "break time"; the show itself broke the entire Earth-1 segment of the Arrowverse, to the point that literally the only way to fix it is do something that I had up to this point been very strongly against: a "Crisis on Infinite Earths".
It's also fundamentally narratively impossible for the "time travel" excuse to actually mean something in-universe due to the way that all 3 of the E1 Arrowverse series have DEALT with the concept of time travel and its "ripple effects".
Legends didn't just have its characters "break time"; the show itself broke the entire Earth-1 segment of the Arrowverse, to the point that literally the only way to fix it is do something that I had up to this point been very strongly against: a "Crisis on Infinite Earths".
You're making a lot of assumptions about what will happen in season 3. As I said, I expect the immediate problem to be mostly resolved by the end of the season premiere (or the second episode, at latest), and the rest of the season to be about the lingering anomalies occurring here and there through a history that's largely back to normal.
Besides, as I said, it's not that different from what season 2 did with Darhk, Merlyn, and Snart being removed from their pasts without erasing prior continuity.
Very little, if anything, is "narratively impossible," because narrative is not reality, and thus it is not required to be self-consistent or logical. After all, a narrative is an idea, an abstraction, and abstract ideas can be logically or physically impossible. That's how we have paradoxes and oxymorons and figures of speech. It is, for instance, physically impossible to pull oneself up by one's own bootstraps (unless, say, they're extremely long straps that are looped over a pulley), but it is conceptually possible to imagine the idea and understand the meaning of the phrase as a metaphor. Stories are metaphors, so they can depict the impossible and the inconsistent. Effectively all things are narratively possible, though not all things are narratively preferable.
That is not the only way to fix it; it is merely the only way you have thought of in the limited amount of time you've spent considering it. The show is made by people who are paid professionals at imagining things and who devote themselves to it full-time. So I'd be willing to bet that they can imagine more fixes than you can. Indeed, I'm sure they already have, or they wouldn't have set things up this way in the first place.
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