In Which I Tell Legends Of Tomorrow How To Do It’s Job Regarding The Legion Of Doom

In which I tell Legends of Tomorrow how to do it’s job regarding the Legion of Doom

The Legion of Doom story line could have been so much better if they actually played to the differences between the members and recognized the established canon qualities of those characters. (It’s not that I disliked the season, it’s just that it could have been so much more if they hadn’t decided that a watered-down Eobard Thawne was the best thing since sliced bread)

For one thing, all three of the main Legion members have wildly different motivations for wanting to change reality. Thawne is acting out of a very primal survival instinct- he’s being hunted and he wants to prevent being erased. It’s immediate and urgent and it’s going to make him dangerous and desperate. Darhk is the most supervillain-esque in his motivation- he also wants to avoid dying but it’s a very distant abstract thing for him (he knows he’s going to die 30+ years down the road- that’s a far cry from seeing a corpse-like monster coming for you every time you stay in one place for too long) but beyond that he wants power. Merlyn, on the other hand (ba dum tss), is actually primarily motivated by loss- most recently that has been loss of power, but his bigger concern has always been his family. Arrow 3x12 indicates that Merlyn is actually a lot more remorseful than he lets on, and when you come right down to it, losing his family is what changed him and given the option, he would potentially undo a lot his choices in order to regain his family. Merlyn wants his wife and son to be alive, and to repair his relationship with his daughter (he goes about these things in a horrible perverse way, of course, but the underlying idea isn’t evil. And of course he would definitely grab power along the way if he could. He was a billionaire ceo who was best friends with the Queen’s- he was never a saint).

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