The 10 Best Episodes Of 'Legends Of Tomorrow'

Conceptually, Legends of Tomorrow is... odd. Its first season brings together supporting heroes and villains from The Flash and Arrow and sends them tumbling through time, including (but not limited to) petty thieves Heatwave and Captain Cold (Dominic Purcell and Wentworth Miller of Prison Break, playing off each other in deliciously operatic fashion), scientist Martin Stein (Victor Garber) and car mechanic Jefferson 'Jax' Jackson (Franz Drameh), who combine to form a single, flame-headed nuclear superhero F.I.R.E.S.T.O.R.M., undead assassin The White Canary (Caity Lotz), John Constantine (Matt Ryan; yes, that John Constantine) and boyscout superhero Ray Palmer/The Atom, played by none other than Brandon Routh of Superman Returns.

Full disclosure: the first season leaves a lot to be desired. It's a messy, dour collection of decent-to-good character moments focusing on an underwhelming villain, Vandal Savage (Casper Crump, who performs admirably) on the heels of two equally underwhelming heroes, Hawkman (Falk Hentschel) and Hawk-Girl (Ciara Renée), but the reason I'm keen to write about Legends is because its second season is functionally a soft reboot. The show changes up its structure entirely, leaning hard in to the inherent ridiculousness of inept superheroes given the ability to travel anywhere in history. I mean, why wouldn't they go hang out with J.R.R. Tolkien during World War I?

By the time the third season rolls around, our heroes have broken time itself and Legends of Tomorrow becomes the most bonkers show on television, to the point that I had to avoid simply listing every episode. Like the one where they have to stop Julius Caesar from recruiting a modern frat-boy army in Aruba. Or the one where they're kidnapped by P.T. Barnum and become part of his circus act, which now includes a saber-toothed tiger. Or the one where they have team up with Hedy Lamarr to stop Helen of Troy from becoming a Hollywood movie star and drop her off on Themyscira, the island from Wonder Woman, instead. You get the idea.

I shouldn't be this excited for a listicle about a superhero series, but this is something I really hope people get on board with. Twitter user @azelben summed up the whole thing pretty nicely: "My second favorite thing is watching Legends of Tomorrow. My first favorite thing is describing episodes of Legends of Tomorrow to people who don't watch the show."

Well, here goes nothing.

What happens in the first season of Legends of Tomorrow? There are a couple of major sacrifices, Rip Hunter and Captain Cold in particular, but apart from that it doesn't really matter. "Out of Time" relaunches the show through the eyes of historian Nate Heywood (Nick Zano), who notices the history books are changing because the Legends, well... they messed with time a little too much. The episode plays like a clip show, catching us up on what the characters have been up to as they clear up historical aberrations — Captain Sarah Lance/White Canary has been sleeping with the Queen of France, for one — before turning into a race against, err, time, to stop The Reverse Flash of The Flash and Damian Darhk and Malcolm Merlyn of Arrow (The Legion of Doooooom!) from *deep breath* teaming up with the Nazis to kidnap Albert Einstein so they can make the A-bomb first. They succeed, and they even force Einstein to rightly share credit for his work with his wife, but their presence in 1942 brings them face to face with...

The Justice League before there was a Justice League, the JSA — Hourman, Commander Steel (Nate's grandfather!) Star Girl, Vixen, Obsidian and Dr. Mid-Nite — stop the Legends in their tracks, resulting in this delightful battle scene between the two superhero teams:

"Obsidian, shut off the light!"

Confederate zombies. Next.

Okay, not next just yet. "Abominations" is when the show really starts to cut loose with its premise, sending the team back to the days of the Civil War to contain a deadly outbreak, but it doesn't skirt around the difficult question of what might happen if this journey is undertaken by African American character Jefferson Jackson, named for two U.S. Presidents. The answer is surprisingly moving: the Legends don't just fight undead confederate soldiers, they also free slaves along the way as Jackson instills them with hope for a better future.

Here's where things get really silly. See, Captain Rip Hunter from the first season never really died, he just erased his own memory and went to live in California in the '60s so the Legion of Doom couldn't extract the whereabouts of the Spear of Longinus from him (yes, that Spear of Longinus), but some part of his memories remained, manifesting as creative impulse. So Hunter becomes a film director, and the movie he feels compelled to make is, essentially, the first season of Legends of Tomorrow. During production, the Legion attacks his film set, scaring off one of his assistants, who's now dissuaded from making movies. Still with me?

In the present, Nate forgets all the History he learned. Ray Palmer loses his engineering smarts. Somehow, the movies that inspired them to choose their respective career paths — Raiders of the Lost Ark and Star Wars — were never made. Rip Hunter's assistant in the '60s? A young George Lucas, who the Legends now have to convince to become a filmmaker again!

And folks, we haven't even gotten to season three yet...

The Dominators in the four-way Flash/Arrow/Supergirl/Legends "Invasion!" crossover are a terrifying breed of psychic alien. But what would happen if there was a small one, a really cute one in fact, that little Ray Palmer decided to adopt when he was a kid in order to save it from government persecution, a la E.T.? Well, the rest of the Legends have to travel back in time to find out, because Ray has disappeared from the ship, apparently having never made it past his tenth birthday in this new timeline. Is it a beat for beat riff on Spielberg's classic? You bet. Does it re-create the scene where the kids fly past the moon? Damn right. Is it a start-to-finish delight despite, or perhaps even because of its predictability, hitting every homage you'd expect? Now you're catching on.

(Does it also have an unexpected musical number? Okay, I'll stop)

A talking blue teddy bear from the '70s, Beebo ("I Lo-Lo-Love You!"), lands up in the time of the Vikings and is worshipped as a God, changing all of history. There is no Christmas, or even Christianity. There is only... Beebo Day. "Beebo Hungry!" says the bear when its belly is rubbed; the Vikings, fearing their God's displeasure, pillage in his name. To make matters worse, before the Legends can un-step in all this Beebo bullshit, Damian Darhk shows up in Odin cosplay to get the Vikings to worship him instead. Oh boy. (Worth noting: this teddy bear keeps popping up throughout the season, even on The Flash, a motif that pays of stupendously)

Damian Darhk spends the whole season fighting alongside his daughter Nora in order to free the demon Mallus, who was trapped in time by five "totem bearers" long ago (Legends' equivalent of the Infinity Stones). In order to repair the broken fire totem, Darhk sends his daughter and a kidnapped Ray Palmer to 1962 Berlin to kidnap a scientist, who also happens to be the target of a skilled assassin: Damian Darhk himself in 1962 (Neal McDonough in a hilarious wig), resulting in an unexpected pivot into Cold War spy-action territory.

The episode starts out with the present Darhk killing the creator of a dating app because he isn't getting enough matches ("Interests: re-creating the world in my image") but it ends with Darhk fighting his old self and potentially beginning a journey back towards the side of good, earning the character development along the way as it takes the risk of making ruthless murderers endearing. By the end however, we may even want their redemption. It's utterly ridiculous, and yet, dramatically sound. The episode also sees Kid Flash/Wally West joining the Legends, because why the hell not?

A young Elvis Presley winds up with the "death totem." His guitar becomes haunted by the ghost of his dead brother, which flies around the Legends' space-ship as they try to catch the haunted instrument (this show is your one-stop destination for all the great physical comedy ever) and it also involves Elvis serenading a ruthless undead army with his beautiful voice in order to lay them to rest. Why are you still reading this list? Just watch the damn show already. Okay, no, wait, hold on. I have to tell you about this next one...

John Noble, Denethor from The Lord of the Rings, voices the demon Mallus, who by this point has begun to control the mind of Damian Darhk's daughter Nora. In order to set her free, the Legends have to find someone to impersonate Mallus so they can record some phrases and fool Nora into believing they're Mallus' instructions. Upon realizing that Mallus sounds a whole lot like a certain actor playing a certain Australian actor playing a certain Tolkein character, they travel back to New Zealand in the late '90s and pretend to be part of a certain Peter Jackson's production crew, getting the actor John Noble (playing himself) to record what he thinks are new Denethor lines, but are actually instructions for Nora.

Oh, and Gorilla Grodd travels back in time to kill college-aged Barack Obama who, upon being rescued, dolls out relationship advice to the White Canary, who's just learned that her girlfriend is actually a clone from the future. Normal show.

Look, I'm not even going to try to explain this one:

Yes, that's the Legends, Kid Flash, Jonah Hex and Helen of Troy in the old West fighting Romans and Vikings. Yes, it does somehow make sense in the chronology of the show. Yes, they do in fact combine to form a giant, magical teddy-bear in order to suplex a demon. Why the hell aren't you watching this thing?

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There you have it. Legends of Tomorrow returns October 22, and it looks even more bonkers than before: