***This review contains some spoilers***
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“Legends of Tomorrow” enters its sixth season with a decent concept, but with a mediocre villain and uneven storytelling, the show never really finds its groove.
The plot is pretty standard Legends storytelling: Dangerous aliens are dumped into the timeline and threaten various points in history, so the Legends must stop them. On top of that, Sara has been kidnapped and they need to get her back. This starts off fine, but the “aliens lost in time” stuff gets pushed into the background, while the Sara story arc wraps up fairly quickly after a bizarre resolution that involves Ava clones, alien DNA and a human and alien having sex. After that, it seems like the focus shifts to character-centric stuff and what feel more like standalone episodes. And when all these seemingly random threads are pulled together near the end of the season, it doesn’t really feel where any of those stories where supposed to end up. None of this is helped by the fact the big bad is pretty cheesy. While Bishop’s technical knowhow and his ability to stay a few steps ahead of the Legend gives him an advantage, his plans are so convoluted they seem like they might still fail even if he wasn’t stopped. Add in his quirky mannerisms, and he just never feels all that threatening.
As far as specific stories for the returning cast, it’s a mixed bag. Sara’s kidnapping and cloning is decent but kind of short-lived. Ava’s arc of trying to get Sara back in fine, but the engagement and wedding payoff between those two characters ties it all together nicely. Mick seemed a bit out of character the first half of the season, but then the Kayla stuff gave him something interesting to do. (Even though a lot of the story kind of got pushed to the background for a while.) Behrad never really got a ton to do besides get high, and we really didn’t get as much interaction between him and Zari 2.0 as we were supposed to get. And while it was nice to see Zari 1.0 pop up again, she mostly showed up to give Nate something to do. While Astra being on the team was fine at first, having her seem to want nothing to do with them half the time made her pretty grating, and the amount of skill she gained in magic in such a short time was kind of hard to believe. But, that’s easier to swallow then the concept that Gary was secretly a tentacled alien all this time. Another weak link is new character Spooner. She feels shoe-horned in and her powers are pretty vague and evolve from week to week. Thankfully, some good emotional moments for her near the end of the season allow her to let her guard down. The meatiest storyline belongs to Constantine, as he gets a decent love story and a semi-tragic downfall due to his addiction. If they would have ended it with his death, that would’ve been a solid way to end things, but having him brought back just to leave was weak.
While some of the DC shows have been trying to up there game with the visuals, “Legends” looks about the same as always. There’s a mix of pretty good looking effects, and some really weak stuff. There’s isn’t a whole lot of action, and more often than not, the characters will avoid using their super powers.
Overall, season six of “Legends of Tomorrow” isn’t anything special. While there’s still plenty of humor and quirkiness, combined with characters we’ve grown to love, the lame bad guy and poorly execute plot take some of the fun out of their adventure.
** out of *****