With the success of Arrow and The Flash, two shows I’ve been impressed with and enjoyed from day one, I was as jazzed as the next guy to hear about a third show set in the same universe, taking cast members from both series, centering on a team, and involving, time travel. Aww, hell yeah! I loves me some time travel. But -- it has to be time travel done right and with a fresh take if at all possible. Because even non-genre shows are known to use time travel from time to time (Castle had a very interesting one a few years back, for instance). So a show whose entire mythology is based on it better be delivering the goods. The bar is already high thanks to some stellar episodes involving time hopping in The Flash, and this is just the first season of Legends, so it can be afforded a certain amount of slack. But honestly, slack isn’t going to help basic deficiencies in the premise of the show that have been inherent since the pilot. So while Legends of Tomorrow is built upon a series of temporal adventures, it’s not the best time travel show on TV. It’s not even the best time travel show in its own universe. In fact, here are five ways that The Flash is beating Legends at its own game.

5) The Impracticality of the Waverider to a Stealthy Mission

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Here you have a gigantic time travel ship, meant for a crew of around ten, that looks something akin to if the Millennium Falcon were reimagined as a modern industrial L.A. condo (seriously, those things are going up all over town). The Time Masters talk about being the mindful guardians of time and making discreet changes here and there to safeguard the timeline, yet they have teams jetting around in Condo Falcons. Even though they have cloaking devices, you’ve got to figure those things are going to be seen at some point. It seems a far better proposition that if you’re trying to be as careful as you can about the temporal corrections you’re making, you’d have smaller teams or individuals, in much smaller time vehicles, doing the Time Masters’ work.

Of course, this probably isn’t an altogether fair comparison because Barry Allen (Grant Gustin) doesn’t need a spaceship to journey through time. He just needs his super speed and a panicked reaction to an impending disaster (tidal wave, Egyptian sorcery nuke, etc) to jump back say, 24 hours. In the course of his two trips that were significantly longer, he’s gotten an assist from the collider that spawned his powers, but ultimately not that many people knew about it.

4) The Flash’s Time Travel Comes With In-Flight Movies

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One very cool element of the Flash's take on time traveling has been Speed Force and multidimensional glimpses of past, as well as alternate and future people, places and events. The show gives the fans a multitude of Easter eggs such as Killer Frost, Connor Hawke, the John Wesley Shipp Flash from the 90s, plus a hint at a future crossover with a certain female Kryptonian on another network. It’s become a signature representation that the producers are more than willing to throw back some love at the fans that have come out for this show since the first episode. Whereas Legends of Tomorrow’s Temporal Zone is a glittery, twisty, empty void that looks like someone bedazzled the inside of an Exogorth and ... that's it.

3) Legend’s Missed Opportunities in Time

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To date, the most interesting thing that’s occurred on Legends of Tomorrow regarding all the story possibilities of time travel is the trip to the dystopian future in the episode "Star City 2046". That was a solid episode. But to date, Legends has mostly used its unique storytelling device to serve as set pieces only: 1975 to show how screwed up the ‘70s were, the aforementioned 2046, and then the 1950s to serve as social commentary – then and now - on racism and tolerance for sexual preference. But something special occurred in the two-part episodes, "White Knights" and "Fail-Safe." The group journeyed to Russia seeking Vandal Savage (Casper Crump) and encountered a Russian physicist, Valentina Vostok (Stephanie Corneliussen) who was seeking to reverse engineer the Firestorm Matrix for Savage and become a female Firestorm. Bottom-lining it, she ended up going nuclear…literally. Then it occurred to me that there was a key opportunity to drastically up the stakes – and consequences - for the team which was missed, if only they had only changed the location to Ukraine. 1986. Nuclear meltdown…I think you get the drift. Having the team have a hand in that disaster could have really been an intense story arc to explore.

Admittedly, that’s just one example in the first season of a fledgling show, but The Flash has done more with less when it comes to utilizing the unique opportunities of time travel for stories. With such a large cast and an even larger milieu, and time travel being the central focus of the show, I guess I just look for more from Legends than what I’ve gotten so far. The development with Chronos was a good addition, but honestly, how many episodes are going to be about the team getting the drop on Savage in another era and not being able to close the deal? Savage has become the monster of the week…every week. And shooting blanks against Savage every week can’t possibly sustain this show beyond a couple seasons at most.

Speaking of missed opportunities, did anybody else notice in the pilot episode, when Hunter and the team were speaking to Prof. Boardman (a.k.a. as Kendra and Carter’s son from another time) about when and where Savage might be found, he shows them photographic proof of Savage at major historical events, and they don’t even realize that every single photo is an actual time and location for Savage? It’s kind of like when Shaggy and Scooby are trapped in the room with the Spooky Space Kook and they threw the key to the door out the window, so they have to jump out the window to retrieve the key, jump back in the room and then unlock the door to escape.

2) The Complexity of the Barry Allen / Eobard Thawne Rivalry

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There isn’t a relationship on Legends – within the team or outside of it - that comes anywhere close to the complexity of that between Barry Allen and Eobard Thawne (Tom Cavanagh). Admittedly, the way they tied Vandal Savage’s immortality to Kendra’s and Carter’s reincarnation is a pretty interesting twist, though also very one-note. Nevertheless, Barry and Thawne’s nearly byzantine rivalry has been forged by many encounters over many time periods. Their entire relationship is chicken-and-egg; except here, the chicken is a homicidal, jealous, DNA-hijacking speedster douche who wants to kill the egg, and the egg is a speedster hero-in-the-making with big mommy and daddy issues. Speaking of mommy and daddy issues, the Allen / Thawne rivalry isn’t unlike the whole ’89 Batman “You idiot, you made me!” / “I made you…you made me first” dynamic. But since this particular relationship is begotten in the future and begat from the past, there’s a whole Ouroboros quality to it. And definitely the best of it all has been the slow burn that Tom Cavanagh gives to Thawne in his portrayal (as well as the differences in playing Earth-2 Harrison Wells).

Peep the timeline on this: Thawne goes back in time 15 years, fights the Flash, kills Barry’s mom in front of a childhood Barry, gets stuck in said past and hatches a plan to befriend Barry. He kills and genetically steals the identity of Dr. Harrison Wells, a physicist who will ultimately guide the career of young Barry Allen to the precise point when he’s struck by lightning spawned by a particle accelerator explosion that Thawne / Wells engineered. Thawne then mentors Barry as he embarks on his crime fighting speedster career, actually coming to care for his young, unsuspecting enemy. Barry finds out the truth about Thawne and captures him (featuring some saucy pre-JLA action with The Arrow and Firestorm). He then decides to go back in time to prevent Thawne from killing his mom, despite the extreme danger it presents to the timeline. Major cryfest (Grant Gustin is heartbreaking in this scene), a decision of non-interference, and in the end, Thawne is erased from history by the sacrifice of another.

But wait, a friggin’ younger Thawne emerges in Season 2, new to his own career, but encountering a now-experienced Flash for the first time. And yet due to the temporal danger faced by a friend, Barry has to let the younger Thawne go back to his own future time to eventually go back in time and murder Barry’s mom and…well you know the rest. Gustin and Cavanagh are the big reason The Flash is successful, but the writing of the show, and the ability to find new twists in tried-and-true time travel stories deserves equal praise.

The Entire Premise of 'Legends of Tomorrow' is Bogus

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Rip Hunter says it flat out in Episode 2 when someone wants to go back in time a few minutes to change a regrettable outcome: "We can’t go back and change events in which we participated. Time would fold in on itself creating a temporal vortex.” It seems straight-forward enough (or at least as straight forward as time travel gets), except for the fact that the theory has directly been disproven by the Flash in the recent episode Flash Back. In the episode, Barry comes up with a dangerous plan to go back in time one year to replace himself and interact with Thawne (still incognito as Wells) and learn his secret for running much faster. Barry not only drugs himself, immediately changing the timeline, but he is discovered by Thawne and almost killed. But he does directly interact – and alter – events in which he had previously participated. Now mind you, this isn’t a dispute in time travel rules between different franchises, as both shows take place in the same universe.

And yet, the issue really goes deeper than that. The non-interference thing, while a policy of the Time Dicks Masters, and a practice to which Hunter tried to adhere despite his having gone renegade, is a cover for the fact that while the show has generally been entertaining, the entire premise should be able to be solved rather simply by one of three actions:

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    Either Hunter takes the Waverider back and saves his family sometime before Savage kills them, even by minutes, or
  2. He goes back in time to Egypt (again), this time with the team, and kills Savage before the first time he tried unsuccessfully to kill him, ideally at some point before he gained the power of immortality or
  3. He hijacks Savage, at any point in time they find and capture and kill him (there have been a few already) and either incinerate his body utterly or better yet, take him into space and dump him out of the nearest airlock somewhere around Neptune or so.

The fact that none of these have occurred shows that Hunter has got to be about the worst Time Master in the universe.

Despite these points, I’m actually not down on Legends of Tomorrow. It’s just that for a modern time travel show, I’m hoping for the next City on the Edge of Forever, or Yesterday’s Enterprise or Lee Harvey Oswald. The Flash hasn’t delivered to those levels yet, but it has done some great episodes involving time travel stories, using innovative angles and having weighty consequences (such as the singularity over Central City, Eddie’s and Ronnie’s deaths, Barry’s inability to save his mother). I’m just hoping for Legends to do the same going forward, but it hasn't gotten there yet.

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