DC’s Legends of Tomorrow: The Complete Fifth Season (Blu-Ray + Digital)
Blu-Ray Reviews | Oct 5th, 2020
Starring: Brandon Routh, Caity Lotz, Dominic Purcell, Nick Zano, Maisie Richardson-Sellers, Jes Macallan, Matt Ryan, Adam Tsekhman, Courtney Ford
Created By: Greg Berlanti, Marc Guggenheim, Phil Klemmer
Written By: Various
Studio: Warner Bros. Home Entertainment
Buy On Amazon
Warner Bros. Home Entertainment provided me with a free copy of this Blu-ray set that I reviewed in this post. The opinions I share are my own.
“DC’s Legends of Tomorrow” arrives with the complete fifth season on Blu-ray/DVD/Digital HD and things keep getting wackier and weirder.
Due to the ongoing pandemic and much like the other CW Arrowverse shows, the fifth season of “Legends of Tomorrow” is much shorter than other season, with only 15 episodes making up this season. The season picks up with the final episode of the “Crisis on Infinite Earths” crossover and has all of the surviving heroes promising to defend their newly shared Earth…except for the Legends, which this doesn’t really matter much to them because they’re always off somewhere in time messing things up somehow.
After the events of Hey World last season, the Legends are now kinda sorta beloved public figures and the second episode of this season introduces us to a film crew who is making a documentary of the Legends and follows them around through time and space where they end up in Russia where they come face to face with Rasputin. The Legends adventures take them from Russia to late 1940s mobster America, 18th century France, 90s Hong Kong, Hell and a dystopian future…with them barely managing to set things right soon after they screw things up even more.
The usual theme of “Legends of Tomorrow” has always been about the outcasts and unwanted sidekicks or ancillary characters working together to be greater together than alone. That part is fine and dandy but what wears thin after five seasons is that by now they should be confident in their skills and weary of all of the dangers that time travel entails but that isn’t the case. Most of the time the Legends are still portrayed as bumbling idiots that have no cares whatsoever about screwing up the fabric of time and space even when they punctuate the importance of those dangers in the same episode in which they carelessly alter Shakespearean literature. It’s like watching Wile E. Coyote using time travel to outwit the Road Runner in the middle of a semi-serious plot. Whereas early on in the series, they were fighting a singular deadly threat in Vandal Savage who wanted to alter the timeline for his own motives and where the repercussions of the slightest flux to the timeline was said to be catastrophic, four seasons later and the show has simply become a live action cartoon with no consequences other than to push the thin plotlines forward.
While the show leaned away from the seriousness of the first few seasons for more light-hearted adventure, there were still some fun and somber moments from season 5. “Mr. Parker’s Cul-De-Sac” was not only a tribute to “Mr. Rogers Neighborhood” but also a great moment for the on-going relationship between Ray and Nora. The episode dealt with coping with trauma with Nora becoming a fairy godmother and with Ray getting the blessing of Damien Darhk after feeling he wasn’t worthy enough or good enough to be her husband. Constantine’s storyline this season was too good to be isolated to just background stories throughout various episodes this season. If anyone from the show should leave it should be Constantine…to get a proper continuation of his NBC series and to team up with Swamp Thing like it should be.
Overall, season five of “DC’s Legends of Tomorrow” feels a lot like the last few seasons of the show. At times it feels like watching a bad sitcom while other times its more campy and cartoony than the 60s Batman show. While I give props to the shows genre-bending and genre-jumping recklessness, it misses the mark more than it hits the target. Most of the characters on the show don’t get the proper attention needed to really develop their stories because the majority of an episodes runtime is used up in fixing the crazy antics that the team gets into all of the time. Maybe the show would benefit from the smaller team that they’ll have moving forward or with a shorter season in order to gain a more pinpoint focus on one or two good storylines instead of 32 randomly interwoven ones that really don’t go anywhere overall. With the Arrowverse getting smaller and smaller with the loss of “Arrow” and the recent announcement of “Supergirl” ending after the next season, the Legends better put up or shut up or they’ll be putting in applications to the D.E.O. or Team Flash.
Features:
• Deleted Scenes
• “DC’s Legends of Tomorrow” Season 5 Post Production Theater Featurette
• Gag Reel
• Blu-ray Bonus Disc containing all 5 DC Crossover Episodes of “Crisis on Infinite Earths” + Special Features
Audio:
DTS-HD Master Audio English 5.1
English SDH, French and Spanish Subtitles
Video:
1080p High Definition 16×9 1.78:1
Bottom Line: The fifth season of “DC’s Legends of Tomorrow” feels like much more of the same nonsense as the last few seasons. There were some decent plotlines and character arcs that get buried underneath the shows “witty humor” and cartoony recklessness. Welcome to time-traveling “Friends”.
Running Time: 636 Mins
Rating: Not Rated
Extras Rating:
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