Legends of Tomorrow, TV’s weirdest superhero show, must be seen to be believed

Perhaps the best way to describe DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, the flat-out weirdest show in The CW’s DC superhero universe, is to let the characters speak for themselves:

"This can't be happening. They're not smart enough for this to be happening." —Eobard Thawne

“We've barely begun, and already this is the worst, unmitigated disaster of my career.” —Captain Rip Hunter

“Who writes this crap anyway?” —Mick Rory

The fourth DC universe show developed by Greg Berlanti and Andrew Kreisberg — the team that brought The Flash, Arrow, and Supergirl to The CW — Legends of Tomorrow is like if the gang from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia stole the TARDIS from Doctor Who. The series, which follows the nonsense space adventures of a group of lovable assholes, embodies the spirit of “so crazy it just might work.”

It’s my favorite show on television, and it could be yours too.

I know: Keeping up with every piece of superhero entertainment in our current cultural landscape is exhausting. But I’m not asking you to watch another show about a lone wolf do-gooder on a mission to save their city. I’m asking you to give a chance to Legends of Tomorrow, a show about a ragtag family of misfits destroying history one poorly conceived and executed time travel mission at a time.

Need further convincing? In honor of the series’ wackadoodle second season, which ends with Tuesday night’s finale, here are eight reasons Legends of Tomorrow must be seen to be believed.

1) The premise is a joke (seriously)

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The Legends of Tomorrow pilot is a mess of unconvincing seriousness: The idea that this team has been chosen by destiny to save the world sounds unlikely because it is. The Time Master, a.k.a. Rip Hunter (Arthur Darvill), isn’t James Bond, or even the Doctor. He’s a desperate mess looking to hire a hit squad to kill the immortal asshole Vandal Savage (Casper Crump).

Everyone on the team is less than a hero; they’re doomed nobodies with no effect on history, castoffs from The Flash and Arrow. When the intro says, “Don’t call them heroes, call them Legends,” it’s quite literally a joke — and that self-awareness is what keeps Legends of Tomorrow palatable where other superhero shows get smothered by angst.

2) The Legends are technically a wanted terrorist organization

No, I’m not talking about when Hawkgirl (Ciara Renée) and Firestorm (Franz Drameh and Victor Garber) attacked the Pentagon, or even Mick (Dominic Purcell) and Ray (Brandon Routh) setting fire to a White House tour. All that was small potatoes compared with time terrorism.

See, when Rip stole the Waverider — the ship/base the Legends use to trip through time — he became a fugitive from the Time Masters, who are like the government but for time travel nonsense, and everyone helping him automatically became an accomplice. While the term “time terrorist” isn’t used, it’s strongly implied when the Legends eventually blow up and kill all the Time Masters over ideological differences.

The Legends have also set off a fair number of nukes. Using Quantico as a reference point, I’m going to call one nuclear bomb getting detonated by a lovable loser the baseline acceptable amount of nuclear detonations. The Legends have set off at least three.

3) The Legends kidnap themselves as babies

In season one, the Time Masters sent an assassin to target the crew’s past selves, which would write their current selves out of existence. After saving Mick and Sara Lance (Caity Lotz) as teenagers, the crew realizes the safest move is to kidnap themselves as babies. However, they have no interest in taking care of themselves as babies. Instead they hand the baby version of Wentworth Miller’s Leonard Snart over to teen Mick and teen Sara to look after, with only the advice that if they do a bad job, they’ll be sorry.

I feel like I would be much more careful with a baby that was me in the past, but ehh, maybe I wouldn’t. Babies are annoying.

4) Sara Lance: flirting her way through history

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Sara Lance, noted immortal badass, is having the time of her second life kissing women and making men fall in love with her all over time and space. She’s seduced a sweet nurse in the 1950s, the queen of France, basically the whole town of Salem during the witch trials, and Queen Guinevere of Camelot.

Sara even went back in time to become friends with the ageless Ra’s al Ghul 50 years before they meet up in her lifetime, just so at the last minute she could rub it in his face that at some future point she’s going to bang his daughter, Nyssa. Truly a hero for the ages.

5) Rip Hunter wants to screw his spaceship

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Sara isn’t the only one using the Waverider as a dating service: Amaya (Maisie Richardson-Sellers) hooked up with her friend’s adult grandson, and Ray tried to marry a hawk god.

But Rip Hunter takes the cake when it comes to workplace romances. After he gets brainwashed, the team has to go into his mind, where they find an anthropomorphic version of the Waverider’s AI system, Gideon (Amy Pemberton). Rip and Gideon, finally in a situation where they both have human bodies, make out until Rip will literally die if he doesn’t leave. (For those worried about the computer’s ability to consent, Gideon goes out of her way to say she was into it.)

This is the only functional couple on the show.

6) Rip Hunter tries to kill a child, and loses

The ethical dilemma presented by killing a future monster as a child is a run-of-the-mill time travel issue. But when Rip wants to stop a genocidal dictator by killing him as a child, the team’s refusal to take Rip seriously — even after he kidnaps the kid — elevates the episode to high art.

While Rip talks himself into a shooting a brat, Ray has a sitcom-y side adventure where he meets one of his descendants and freaks out over whom he might have impregnated in 2016. Rip obviously doesn’t murder a child, and both these plots accidentally trigger the genocide they tried to prevent.

7) Camelot is a real, historically inaccurate place

In addition to sometimes being able to turn to steel, Nate (Nick Zano) is the crew’s live-in historian. Since Gideon can look up anything that ever has or ever will happen in all of time, Nate’s main contribution as a historian is pointing out the historical inaccuracies in Camelot that time they visited Camelot, a real place.

8) Jesus is definitely 100 percent real, and the Legends need to steal his blood

Season two centered on the Legends trying to find the Spear of Destiny, a magical artifact that can rewrite reality. Go with it; it’s not important.

The important thing is the spear has this power because Jesus Christ bled on it during the crucifixion. In case you think that’s a myth with a scientific explanation, it’s not, because only Jesus’s blood can destroy the spear, and they have to find some of it. It’s even briefly suggested, then immediately shot down, that the Legends visit Jesus on the cross directly and stab him just a little bit. Also the spear can only be activated by the word of God, which is pretty easy to find, as it turns out.

If you guessed that the Legends find a vial of Jesus’s blood by kidnapping J.R.R. Tolkien, then congratulations! You finally understand what makes Legends of Tomorrow so great.

The season two finale of Legends of Tomorrow airs Tuesday on the CW at 8 pm Eastern. Season one is streaming on Netflix.