Spoilers DC's Legends of Tomorrow - Season 2

[Christopher]

All four of the Arrowverse series have been stellar this season, but Supergirl and Legends have been the most "focused" thus far in terms of laying out their overall narratives, and are the series I would rank at the top right now.

For me, this was the first week that the Earth-1 shows impressed me this season. All three of them were kind of iffy before, but they all pulled it together and pulled off excellent episodes this week. I hope they can keep it up.

(Victor Garber belting out Edelweiss to a room full of Nazis was utterly hilarious brilliance)

I didn't put it together until now that "Edelweiss" is from The Sound of Music and that that's a movie about escaping from the Nazis. Is there some more specific significance to that song in the musical? I haven't seen it in ages. (I'm not really a fan of "Edelweiss," because back in high school I had a watch whose alarm played "Edelweiss" in rather strident, shrill electronic tones that always jarred me even after having years to get used to them. I got deathly sick of that melody. Fortunately, it's been long enough that that visceral reaction to the tune has faded.)

I loved it that Stein did a Marty McFly homage. "Key of A, watch me for the changes, and try to keep up." Not verbatim, but close enough. I wonder if there was a guy on the phone offstage going, "Richard, it's your cousin Marvin Rodgers! You have to hear this!"

 

[DigificWriter]

@Christopher: In The Sound of Music (which was a stage musical before it was a film), the context of the song is that it's sung by the male lead, Captain Von Trapp, at a public festival as a statement of subtle defiance for the pressure that's been put on him by his own honor and the annexation of Austria by Germany (the Anschluss) and as a goodbye to his homeland prior to he and his family escaping the country.

As an aside, the reasoning behind Victor Garber singing that particular song is that it actually came about as a result of a conversation between Marc Guggenheim and Greg Berlanti. Guggenheim and the other Legends producers were talking to Greg about their plan to have the Legends infiltrate a Nazi club, and Greg insisted that they have Victor Garber sing, to which Marc Guggenheim jokingly replied "What, he sings ‘Edelweiss’?", to which Greg responded “Yes, do that!”.

 

[Jax]

Surely the Legends could just go back in time just before Rex was killed? Killing the leader of the JSA counts as a big change to the timeline one that Gideon should detect? Also no one on either team has the power to stop Reverse Flash so I presume Barry Allen is going to be needed for that.

Also do you think Reverse Flash steals Gideon from the Legends since he was using her in season 1 of Flash.

 

[DigificWriter]

Surely the Legends could just go back in time just before Rex was killed? Killing the leader of the JSA counts as a big change to the timeline one that Gideon should detect? Also no one on either team has the power to stop Reverse Flash so I presume Barry Allen is going to be needed for that.

Thawne is a main character on Legends now, and Barry has his own crap to deal with, so the answer to the question of whether or not the Legends are going to have to call on him for help is a "No".

Also do you think Reverse Flash steals Gideon from the Legends since he was using her in season 1 of Flash.

The version of Gideon that we saw Thawne/Wells use is different from the version that exists on the Waverider, and, besides, chronologically, the events of Legends take place AFTER Thawne was stranded in the past and took over E1 Wells' body.

 

[Christopher]

Also no one on either team has the power to stop Reverse Flash so I presume Barry Allen is going to be needed for that.

I seem to recall that the original Firestorm held his own in battle against the Flash once or twice, and the current Firestorm has developed additional powers. Heat Wave gave Flash some trouble too, though in conjunction with Captain Cold. So they might be able to handle themselves against the Reverse Flash, with the rest of the team as backup.

Also do you think Reverse Flash steals Gideon from the Legends since he was using her in season 1 of Flash.

I assume Gideon is like Siri -- not a unique entity, but an AI assistant product owned by many people in the future.

chronologically, the events of Legends take place AFTER Thawne was stranded in the past and took over E1 Wells' body.

Not as far as this Thawne is concerned, because he's (presumably) the Thawne that Barry stopped from killing his mother in the first place, then imprisoned in Flashpoint, then took back to restore the timeline. So this Thawne never became Wells. Still, you're right that he acquired Gideon before he went back to kill Barry's mother.

Then again, I'm only assuming that there's a continuity between the Thawne who left Barry at the end of the Flash premiere and the Thawne who showed up helping Darhk in the following week's LoT premiere. Given their order and proximity, it seems logical that the producers intended us to connect them that way. Still, it hasn't been made explicit, so it's conceivable that this is a Thawne from even earlier in his subjective timeline, before he went back to kill Nora. I doubt it, though, since that would complicate the narrative too much.

 

[DigificWriter]

^ E1 Wells is still dead post-Flashpoint, though, or at least not around, so Barry apprehending Thawne doesn't seem to have affected the part of the timeline that is relevant to Wells as a character.

Also, Barry's actions in creating the Flashpoint timeline didn't have any effect on Eddie's death, so we're dealing with a scenario in which the events of Seasons 1 and 2 still happened more or less as we saw them, albeit with a change or two relative to what we saw that were a 'ripple effect', retroactively, from Barry's actions in creating the "Flashpoint" timeline and then asking Thawne to help him undo it.

 

[Christopher]

Well, sorting out the timeline logic on these shows is a fool's errand. I suppose all that matters is the narrative and character logic, and that's why I assume the writers would want this Thawne to be a continuation of the one we saw in "Flashpoint" rather than some earlier or alternate version.

 

[DigificWriter]

^ I think I pretty succinctly summed up the "timeline logic" for these shows with my "we're dealing with a scenario in which the events of Seasons 1 and 2 of The Flash still happened more or less as we saw them, albeit with a change or two relative to what we saw that were a 'ripple effect', retroactively, from Barry's actions in creating the Flashpoint timeline and then asking Thawne to help him undo it", but to each their own.

 

[Christopher]

^But that's not describing the logic, which would mean the progression of cause and effect that led to that outcome. It's merely stating the outcome. Logic is about the why, not the what. And the temporal causality in the Arrowverse shows is insane. Eddie kills himself and his descendant disappears from that moment forward, but everything he did before then still happened? Thawne kills Rex Tyler in 1942, preventing him from ever sending the message from the season finale, yet the Legends still saw that message until Tyler fritzed out of existence in the middle of it? It's nonsense. It's the opposite of logic, because it doesn't add up.

 

[DigificWriter]

The most succinct way to describe the way that time travel in the Arrowverse works is that every time you travel backwards or forwards in time, you create a "time remnant"... essentially a copy of yourself, and any actions that said time remnant took become part of the timeline, even if said time remnant is erased from existence.

 

[Christopher]

^I think that's trying to impose more consistency on the text than is actually there. The only real temporal logic is that these writers make up whatever random rules of time travel they need at any given moment, and thus they're wildly inconsistent from story to story.

 

[DigificWriter]

The Arrowverse's time travel mechanics aren't wildly inconsistent from story to story, though. Everything I outlined has been spelled out on both The Flash and Legends, in exactly the same terms and details that I used, and everything we've seen thus far fits within the framework of what I described.

 

[The Old Mixer]

I don't know, I'm all for a fun superhero show, but this one is just getting a little TOO silly and ridiculous for my taste. The plots have no sense of credibility and make one ridiculous leap after another, there's no internal consistency with anything that happens, and the characters treat their time traveling in the most cavalier and irresponsible way imaginable (making it hard to take any of the threats very seriously at all).
[...]
But now all that has gone out the window, and it feels like I'm just watching some dumb cartoon where nothing really matters.

All of this.

It's nonsense. It's the opposite of logic, because it doesn't add up.

Pretty much describes the entire show for me at this point.

 

[Christopher]

The Arrowverse's time travel mechanics aren't wildly inconsistent from story to story, though. Everything I outlined has been spelled out on both The Flash and Legends, in exactly the same terms and details that I used, and everything we've seen thus far fits within the framework of what I described.

I don't agree that it does. They've been known to contradict their own time-travel rules within a single episode, especially on this show.

 

[YellowSubmarine]

I assume Gideon is like Siri -- not a unique entity, but an AI assistant product owned by many people in the future.

That would make Barry Allen the asshole who installed a backdoor in everyone's AI by making it answer to him just because he created it.

I could see him do that.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

From what we've seen Gideon answers everyone anyway.

 

[Christopher]

What bugs me about time-travel shows today is how much stubble there is on men in the past. That's a huge anachronism. Given that the JSA was presented as a military-type organization, there's no way Rex Tyler would've had so much stubble. Until the past few decades, that wouldn't have been seen as fashionable, but as downright slovenly and disreputable. I could understand a guest actor not wanting to get a haircut for a temporary role, but not even a shave? It would only take a few days to grow back after shooting.

The 12 Monkeys series has this problem too. The lead character is sometimes criticized in the past for his long-haired, unshaven look, but he's nonetheless shown as capable of operating for months as a socially accepted and respected individual in the 1940s or '50 despite his refusal to get a shave or a haircut. I just don't think that would've been possible. The social norms at the time were way too strict to tolerate that.

 

[Dick Whitman]

The stubble bothered me too. Especially after seeing period shows like Mad Men which get that right. Or even 11.22.63 which makes a point of the main character being told he is going to need to get a shave and haircut to not seem out of place in the past.

Also Hourman's costume looked way too modern. Same for Vixen. Isn't it almost indentical to her granddaughter's?

I wonder what the orignal plan was if the original Vixen actress was available? She would have met the Legends in the modern day.

 

[Greg Cox]

@Christopher: In The Sound of Music (which was a stage musical before it was a film), the context of the song is that it's sung by the male lead, Captain Von Trapp, at a public festival as a statement of subtle defiance for the pressure that's been put on him by his own honor and the annexation of Austria by Germany (the Anschluss) and as a goodbye to his homeland prior to he and his family escaping the country.

There's also the joke in that Stein's resorting to a show tune that won't be written for another seventeen years!

This is surely overthinking it, but there's also a (possibly unintentional) meta-joke here in that, even today, many people think that "Edelweiss" really is a traditional Austrian folk song, and not a show tune written in 1959 for the Broadway musical. So to have Stein try to pass it off as an old folk tune back in 1942 is oddly perfect . . . ..

 

[Christopher]

^Actually Stein did say it was an original composition, basically stealing credit for Rodgers and Hammerstein's work.

My father, who infrequently dabbled in amateur writing, once wrote a short story on that premise, about a plagiarist going back in time and selling famous books that hadn't been written yet as his own work in order to get rich. The story title was "Time Enough to Loaf."