Legends of Tomorrow, Legion of Doom
Aug. 6th, 2020 07:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI have been rewatching Legends of Tomorrow and I just watched Doomworld
and there are a few things about it that bug me
and I realise that consistency isnt among the goals of the show
but who the characters even are kind of matters and
I kind of hate what it does with Leonard Snart, and love what it does with Eobard Thawne
even if the shows then ignore any potential subtlety in Eobard.
So the things I could never make sense of... actually it's kind of thing:
in what reality would Eobard ever let Damien Dark be the one to kill the Flash?
Because I can imagine him killing the Flash, but I can't get my head around him being happy someone else did it, let alone kept him in their trophy case.
But this time I paid attention all the times the rest of the Legion said
We can't fight a speedster.
They said it several times, they can't fight a speedster, killing a speedster is a conundrum, they're no match for a speedster, it was why the big fight played out the way it did, we can't fight a speedster so let the Legends do it.
So how did they have the Flash mask in the display case?
Star Labs was in one piece, and none of the Legends had their powers, very much including Firestorm.
No Star Labs explosion, no lightning, no Flash.
But the mask existed independently. Cisco didnt see the Flash in action and design something for him, Cisco made a fireman outfit that he customised for the Flash.
Anyone gearing up to fight the Legion thinks they need to fight Mick, and therefore fire.
Conclusion:
Someone turned up in that costume, but they were not a speedster.
Further speculation: given that Eobard was absolutely delighting in keeping his enemies closer, and Star Labs existed independently of that funny looking dome place the big confrontation happened in, we the fanfic readers might be interested in who he is keeping at Star.
Or who he is keeping at home.
Might be he was just uninterested in people once they weren't speedsters, might be he erased competition from reality, we dont explicitly know.
But we do know the Legion said "the four of us are no match for a speedster"
so we can be pretty sure they didnt fight the Flash.
It also explains why they took Leonard when they took him, though guessing when is a big extrapolation. "Mick, when have we ever destroyed anything we've stolen" means this is before Fire and Ice, before Leonard asked Mick to choose him. He has the cold gun, but he's never beaten a speedster with it. This is *early*, possibly even before the first time we met him, probably before the end of that episode. No Rogues Rules, no need to up his game.
And season one of Legends changed Len's timeline in potentially significant ways. He intervened to try and keep his father out of prison. That didnt work, but it did change the *reason*. First timeline, his father wasnt skilled enough, got caught, went to prison, that made Leonard's life hell, so he got fixated on skill. Second timeline? Well his father was betrayed, maybe even set up. And this Doomworld Len doesnt trust anybody. But if he cant fight a speedster, he isnt as skilled.
Lisa Snart isnt mentioned in Doomworld. Adult Lisa isnt seen anywhere after Mick and Len leave on the Waverider, and child Lisa was last heard of when Rip Hunter promised to return her where she'd come from, as well as returning baby Leonard. Ignoring the Doylist reasons, you get a worrying plausibility: Something went wrong with that.
If this is a Leonard Snart who did not raise Lisa, because the Waverider took baby Len, child Lisa got taken by the Pilgrim, and something somewhere changed?
Mick when he first stepped on a timeship remembers a different guy than the one the Legion are working with.
Maybe a different guy than worked with this post Chronos Mick.
Doylist, Snart has changed roles. Season one he's a person, a character, on the road to redemption. After the Oculus though he's a symbol, not a character. He exists only in relation to Mick. He represents a life of crime. Mick might go back to him, but it means embracing an old version of self, all his criminal days. Because Legends is about grief, so here's a story about Mick moving on.
But I hate it because what Mick told Martin about partners, what he believes about his life long partner, all that about how Len is a hero to him? It's the vagaries of memory. It's smoothing things over with grief. His partner just was not that guy.
Didnt trust him, and used the same language of animal on a leash that everyone including Mick has been using to get at him.
I hate that a lot, because Mick should be able to trust his memory and perception. ... hallucinations are no fair.
Legends made over the story of partnership until it's a story of getting away from an abusive relationship, and they had to bend Snart way out of shape to do it, as far as I can see.
There's excuses. Even before getting into stuff we didnt see. Leonard got recruited by a set of people who routinely used mind control, in this season, so there's no reason to believe he's in his right mind here.
But he also always was a guy who tried to control Mick and save him from his own worse impulses by, well, hitting him on the head a lot.
Which was in fact a problem.
So they had Mick choose differently here.
It just made a long partnership and an intense relationship they really built up as important... poison, retroactively.
Because now he's crime.
Kind of hate that.
Can see the story they're telling is a solid story too.
If Snart was still alive / still a character instead of a foil or symbol, they'd change together.
The story world has all the parts it would need to make that still true. It even had Martin throw out a theory of bonding with the Oculus energy just so he could go oops no. Even though the broken chip doesnt disprove the other thing.
I dont much like Mick choosing the Legends over the Legion at this point because the main (and obviously significant) improvement is they are not actively trying to kill him. They hit him though. They dont trust him. They dont listen to him, mostly, and dont trust him to fly the ship, (though he also clearly doesnt like doing so). And it makes no sense, given he has more experience than the rest of them put together and has kicked all their arses seperately, and also carried them to safety, a lot. He's a solid part of the team and he relies on their understanding over his own, even when they're wrong. But they dont trust him.
So what is his choice really meant to be here?
Prefer the protagonists?
I also am not a big fan of how the story converged on 'blame Eobard'
yes he's trying to destroy the spear, like the Legends were a minute ago.
yes he is petty and mean, loves to gloat, doing evil in a range from kind of a dick to being quick to order deaths. I'm not ignoring that.
He loves the limelight and enjoys showing off about his medals from the president
but when given the power to rewrite reality to his own specifications
he saved the world.
he didnt take credit for things that had happened anyway
he gathered up Legends to work for him and was really petty about using their skills
but they hadnt saved the world in the timeline they were so desperate to get back to
he was famous for clean energy and sustainable desalination, for fixing global warming, for doing things that the early twenty first century definitely did not.
Was all that done by the time he was born?
If it was he's one kind of man.
If it wasn't he is very much another.
Zari next season being all if you saved the world why does it suck
plus what we saw of Kasnia
and Eo!Wells being fond of burgers because there isnt any beef when he's from
to me adds up to him being born in a future where the world did not get saved.
Like Eobard said to Ray in the space capsule, he could use the same dwarf star tech to power a city or the suit.
Though he seems to approve of Ray's choice, says there's no shame in wanting to be greater,
Ray is still making a choice there, not using tech to change the whole system.
Given a chance with the spear, Eobard *did*.
And that's something that he couldnt make work as a time traveller
because, as far as we've seen, time wraiths, and that nasty looking zombie dude.
... why the waverider never has to deal with time wraiths I dont know and it changes the whole argument if he could in fact simply time travel back and introduce fusion early.
Why do the Legends want to change it all back? Unsave the world?
Is it because of what Eobard has done?
Or just Damien Dark?
Eobard followed through on his deal with his partners, didnt reuse the spear the moment they were out of sight, hasnt wiped any of them from reality.
His stated reasons involved gloating and fates worse than death, though his wording in specific is interesting. "You will walk this world knowing that something isnt quite right, that for all your trying you only made things worse, and no one will ever believe you when you tell them about all the sacrifices you made and how close you came to being legends."
It's a plausible read on the Eobard we knew at this moment that
this is exactly what happened to him
when he set out to do exactly what he eventually only did with the spear:
Save the world.
And then next season had the Earth X version claim to be main line Thawne, and suddenly all the interesting went far, far away.
Not defending that guy.
Not actually defending this one. The cruelty was why it all fell apart. The only stable timeline is the win win win.
It's just that this guy is plausibly complex enough that where they took the story got annoying
because there's nowhere to go after nazis.
So: Loved the episode and the story arc at the same time I hated bits of it
because there's so much in it I could work with
but the story doesnt.
Malcolm Merlyn's corner wasn't satisfying him because all he did was Stepford his wife and kids. Thea adores him? Shyeah, right. Eobard asks him what he'd rewrite and he doesnt give an answer, but I doubt his answer would get him any closer to happiness, if he'd keep that bit.
The story does a bunch of show not tell on what is Real and what, when you get down to it, is evil about the way they use the Spear.
This world isn't Real because nobody got a choice about any of it. They dont get choices about how to react. They're reprogrammed to be toys in the Legion's little drama. And that isnt limited to the Legends, that includes the random cops that no longer want to arrest Leonard and Mick.
... the version of Leonard that can even think he'd be happier simply playing at breaking out of places is so frustrating, because on the one hand I give him about another week before he's tried it all and booooring, but on the other, that's a guy who could retire and white hat.
Working with Damien Dark is a problem because we know what he wants from the world. What Mick used to say he wanted: to watch it burn. He pressed the button on that happening. So I dont see how anyone could propose to work with him, given that he actually did his part to destroy the planet. He does not play well with others. He only keeps others as automatons. There wasnt really a good ending if he's going to be like this. So I dont see why anyone would team up with him.
Not anyone that actually wanted what Eobard got, anyway.
My solution to Dark's stated wish of an empty planet for his chosen to rule involves that universe Star Labs dumped nuclear waste on in a hurry that one time. They actually have empty worlds at that point, so he doesnt need to empty one.
Of course it's possible that world is empty because it's the one where Dark won. Makes it a tad bit less inhabitable.
Earth 15, Trial of the Flash, they said dead Earth so, probably not new Eden.
But neither was Dark's dream.
Okay so also the adjoining universe has a stargate the DEO used, cant remember when, havent memorised Supergirl I guess. So also my solution is to put Earth on a Stargate network that invloves billions of terraformed worlds. You could do it with time travel, if Stargates are possible in universe. You'd just need to take seed ships way way way back in time before you set them travelling, so by the time civilisation is around to use it, the network already exists.
Then everyone who wants a world can have one and the kind of competition for resources that causes most problems would take way longer to exist.
That would take a lot of messing around though, and remain temporally unstable, like if any part of the technological evolution got cut off before the gates were sent back there it could get pretty paradoxical. Like if the Earth pissed people off so got invaded and that interrupted the stargate project. Stuff like that would be ridiculously dangerous.
... but so cool...
Okay, so, I still have one episode left.
It isnt the eoisode that gives me the most to think about
and also I am not a fan of messy death
so, you know, not my favourite.
But I will go and watch it.
and there are a few things about it that bug me
and I realise that consistency isnt among the goals of the show
but who the characters even are kind of matters and
I kind of hate what it does with Leonard Snart, and love what it does with Eobard Thawne
even if the shows then ignore any potential subtlety in Eobard.
So the things I could never make sense of... actually it's kind of thing:
in what reality would Eobard ever let Damien Dark be the one to kill the Flash?
Because I can imagine him killing the Flash, but I can't get my head around him being happy someone else did it, let alone kept him in their trophy case.
But this time I paid attention all the times the rest of the Legion said
We can't fight a speedster.
They said it several times, they can't fight a speedster, killing a speedster is a conundrum, they're no match for a speedster, it was why the big fight played out the way it did, we can't fight a speedster so let the Legends do it.
So how did they have the Flash mask in the display case?
Star Labs was in one piece, and none of the Legends had their powers, very much including Firestorm.
No Star Labs explosion, no lightning, no Flash.
But the mask existed independently. Cisco didnt see the Flash in action and design something for him, Cisco made a fireman outfit that he customised for the Flash.
Anyone gearing up to fight the Legion thinks they need to fight Mick, and therefore fire.
Conclusion:
Someone turned up in that costume, but they were not a speedster.
Further speculation: given that Eobard was absolutely delighting in keeping his enemies closer, and Star Labs existed independently of that funny looking dome place the big confrontation happened in, we the fanfic readers might be interested in who he is keeping at Star.
Or who he is keeping at home.
Might be he was just uninterested in people once they weren't speedsters, might be he erased competition from reality, we dont explicitly know.
But we do know the Legion said "the four of us are no match for a speedster"
so we can be pretty sure they didnt fight the Flash.
It also explains why they took Leonard when they took him, though guessing when is a big extrapolation. "Mick, when have we ever destroyed anything we've stolen" means this is before Fire and Ice, before Leonard asked Mick to choose him. He has the cold gun, but he's never beaten a speedster with it. This is *early*, possibly even before the first time we met him, probably before the end of that episode. No Rogues Rules, no need to up his game.
And season one of Legends changed Len's timeline in potentially significant ways. He intervened to try and keep his father out of prison. That didnt work, but it did change the *reason*. First timeline, his father wasnt skilled enough, got caught, went to prison, that made Leonard's life hell, so he got fixated on skill. Second timeline? Well his father was betrayed, maybe even set up. And this Doomworld Len doesnt trust anybody. But if he cant fight a speedster, he isnt as skilled.
Lisa Snart isnt mentioned in Doomworld. Adult Lisa isnt seen anywhere after Mick and Len leave on the Waverider, and child Lisa was last heard of when Rip Hunter promised to return her where she'd come from, as well as returning baby Leonard. Ignoring the Doylist reasons, you get a worrying plausibility: Something went wrong with that.
If this is a Leonard Snart who did not raise Lisa, because the Waverider took baby Len, child Lisa got taken by the Pilgrim, and something somewhere changed?
Mick when he first stepped on a timeship remembers a different guy than the one the Legion are working with.
Maybe a different guy than worked with this post Chronos Mick.
Doylist, Snart has changed roles. Season one he's a person, a character, on the road to redemption. After the Oculus though he's a symbol, not a character. He exists only in relation to Mick. He represents a life of crime. Mick might go back to him, but it means embracing an old version of self, all his criminal days. Because Legends is about grief, so here's a story about Mick moving on.
But I hate it because what Mick told Martin about partners, what he believes about his life long partner, all that about how Len is a hero to him? It's the vagaries of memory. It's smoothing things over with grief. His partner just was not that guy.
Didnt trust him, and used the same language of animal on a leash that everyone including Mick has been using to get at him.
I hate that a lot, because Mick should be able to trust his memory and perception. ... hallucinations are no fair.
Legends made over the story of partnership until it's a story of getting away from an abusive relationship, and they had to bend Snart way out of shape to do it, as far as I can see.
There's excuses. Even before getting into stuff we didnt see. Leonard got recruited by a set of people who routinely used mind control, in this season, so there's no reason to believe he's in his right mind here.
But he also always was a guy who tried to control Mick and save him from his own worse impulses by, well, hitting him on the head a lot.
Which was in fact a problem.
So they had Mick choose differently here.
It just made a long partnership and an intense relationship they really built up as important... poison, retroactively.
Because now he's crime.
Kind of hate that.
Can see the story they're telling is a solid story too.
If Snart was still alive / still a character instead of a foil or symbol, they'd change together.
The story world has all the parts it would need to make that still true. It even had Martin throw out a theory of bonding with the Oculus energy just so he could go oops no. Even though the broken chip doesnt disprove the other thing.
I dont much like Mick choosing the Legends over the Legion at this point because the main (and obviously significant) improvement is they are not actively trying to kill him. They hit him though. They dont trust him. They dont listen to him, mostly, and dont trust him to fly the ship, (though he also clearly doesnt like doing so). And it makes no sense, given he has more experience than the rest of them put together and has kicked all their arses seperately, and also carried them to safety, a lot. He's a solid part of the team and he relies on their understanding over his own, even when they're wrong. But they dont trust him.
So what is his choice really meant to be here?
Prefer the protagonists?
I also am not a big fan of how the story converged on 'blame Eobard'
yes he's trying to destroy the spear, like the Legends were a minute ago.
yes he is petty and mean, loves to gloat, doing evil in a range from kind of a dick to being quick to order deaths. I'm not ignoring that.
He loves the limelight and enjoys showing off about his medals from the president
but when given the power to rewrite reality to his own specifications
he saved the world.
he didnt take credit for things that had happened anyway
he gathered up Legends to work for him and was really petty about using their skills
but they hadnt saved the world in the timeline they were so desperate to get back to
he was famous for clean energy and sustainable desalination, for fixing global warming, for doing things that the early twenty first century definitely did not.
Was all that done by the time he was born?
If it was he's one kind of man.
If it wasn't he is very much another.
Zari next season being all if you saved the world why does it suck
plus what we saw of Kasnia
and Eo!Wells being fond of burgers because there isnt any beef when he's from
to me adds up to him being born in a future where the world did not get saved.
Like Eobard said to Ray in the space capsule, he could use the same dwarf star tech to power a city or the suit.
Though he seems to approve of Ray's choice, says there's no shame in wanting to be greater,
Ray is still making a choice there, not using tech to change the whole system.
Given a chance with the spear, Eobard *did*.
And that's something that he couldnt make work as a time traveller
because, as far as we've seen, time wraiths, and that nasty looking zombie dude.
... why the waverider never has to deal with time wraiths I dont know and it changes the whole argument if he could in fact simply time travel back and introduce fusion early.
Why do the Legends want to change it all back? Unsave the world?
Is it because of what Eobard has done?
Or just Damien Dark?
Eobard followed through on his deal with his partners, didnt reuse the spear the moment they were out of sight, hasnt wiped any of them from reality.
His stated reasons involved gloating and fates worse than death, though his wording in specific is interesting. "You will walk this world knowing that something isnt quite right, that for all your trying you only made things worse, and no one will ever believe you when you tell them about all the sacrifices you made and how close you came to being legends."
It's a plausible read on the Eobard we knew at this moment that
this is exactly what happened to him
when he set out to do exactly what he eventually only did with the spear:
Save the world.
And then next season had the Earth X version claim to be main line Thawne, and suddenly all the interesting went far, far away.
Not defending that guy.
Not actually defending this one. The cruelty was why it all fell apart. The only stable timeline is the win win win.
It's just that this guy is plausibly complex enough that where they took the story got annoying
because there's nowhere to go after nazis.
So: Loved the episode and the story arc at the same time I hated bits of it
because there's so much in it I could work with
but the story doesnt.
Malcolm Merlyn's corner wasn't satisfying him because all he did was Stepford his wife and kids. Thea adores him? Shyeah, right. Eobard asks him what he'd rewrite and he doesnt give an answer, but I doubt his answer would get him any closer to happiness, if he'd keep that bit.
The story does a bunch of show not tell on what is Real and what, when you get down to it, is evil about the way they use the Spear.
This world isn't Real because nobody got a choice about any of it. They dont get choices about how to react. They're reprogrammed to be toys in the Legion's little drama. And that isnt limited to the Legends, that includes the random cops that no longer want to arrest Leonard and Mick.
... the version of Leonard that can even think he'd be happier simply playing at breaking out of places is so frustrating, because on the one hand I give him about another week before he's tried it all and booooring, but on the other, that's a guy who could retire and white hat.
Working with Damien Dark is a problem because we know what he wants from the world. What Mick used to say he wanted: to watch it burn. He pressed the button on that happening. So I dont see how anyone could propose to work with him, given that he actually did his part to destroy the planet. He does not play well with others. He only keeps others as automatons. There wasnt really a good ending if he's going to be like this. So I dont see why anyone would team up with him.
Not anyone that actually wanted what Eobard got, anyway.
My solution to Dark's stated wish of an empty planet for his chosen to rule involves that universe Star Labs dumped nuclear waste on in a hurry that one time. They actually have empty worlds at that point, so he doesnt need to empty one.
Of course it's possible that world is empty because it's the one where Dark won. Makes it a tad bit less inhabitable.
Earth 15, Trial of the Flash, they said dead Earth so, probably not new Eden.
But neither was Dark's dream.
Okay so also the adjoining universe has a stargate the DEO used, cant remember when, havent memorised Supergirl I guess. So also my solution is to put Earth on a Stargate network that invloves billions of terraformed worlds. You could do it with time travel, if Stargates are possible in universe. You'd just need to take seed ships way way way back in time before you set them travelling, so by the time civilisation is around to use it, the network already exists.
Then everyone who wants a world can have one and the kind of competition for resources that causes most problems would take way longer to exist.
That would take a lot of messing around though, and remain temporally unstable, like if any part of the technological evolution got cut off before the gates were sent back there it could get pretty paradoxical. Like if the Earth pissed people off so got invaded and that interrupted the stargate project. Stuff like that would be ridiculously dangerous.
... but so cool...
Okay, so, I still have one episode left.
It isnt the eoisode that gives me the most to think about
and also I am not a fan of messy death
so, you know, not my favourite.
But I will go and watch it.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-06 11:20 am (UTC)watching the bad guy die screaming
because I do not like
watching anyone die screaming
the story keeps having Eobard kill the cinnamon roll just to be crystal clear about the whole bad guy thing
Ray let him get away from the zombie speedster, if he let anyone live he should be kind to Ray, but nope.
All of team bad guy chose to do a whole lot of murder. Put them jnder pressure, murder happens.
Sara gets a moment of being Strong, with the story being she went through all that bad so now she is Strong, and she doesnt need to be pure of heart.
Which is good cause she very much set Eobard up.
to die screaming.
a lot.
I mean, I personally have a problem with that.
And. And! If their duty is to Time, which is 'sacred', then why tf arent they Helping Him Exist??? They all remember him existing and him existing is rather essential to the timeline and there's only raggedy pieces of his existence left and WHY is this not in their wheelhouse to Heal?!
I am just not seeing how they're consistent. I am not a fan of that.
He should also and separately stop killing people, obviously, that pisses people off and things fall apart.
The other three get sent home with their memories wiped, when what they wanted from time was... petty and selfish.
Eobard dies screaming
when what he wanted was
To Live
and
To Save The World.
I mean, whatever story they wanted to tell here, I am not getting.
Grumpy.
Mick sending Leonard back was sad.
It said 2014. Don't know when.
The people the story picks for a chance to change their fate... *sigh*
I like that Mick chooses to grow, I don't like that Snart will never get the chance to.
... I have such an epic fixit in my head. Epic.
... it just relies on me going there and yelling at people so pretty much nobody wants to read it.
Ah well.