Midway Through ‘Legends Of Tomorrow’ Season 1

Things that need some work:

1. Rip Hunter’s lack of effectiveness as a leader is definitely a problem. Numerous times he has split the team up, for seemingly pointless reasons, resulting in the team nearly being killed time and time again. Once or twice it has made sense, like wanting to keep Sara and Ray from seeing Star City 2046, but more often than not it blows up in his face, such as when attacking Savage in Russia, he splits them up leading to the capture of Mick, Sara, and Ray. Jax put it best in episode 5 when he said to Rip, “You’re playing chess without all your pieces on the board.” There have been a couple times where various characters have mentioned needing to work as a team, but Rip has yet to take that lesson to heart.
2. Something else that has bothered me is the number of times Ray has left the Waverider without his suit. Multiple times they have shown that he can shrink his suit when he’s not wearing it, for easier transport. Why would he ever go in the field and, at minimum, not have his suit in his pocket where he can quickly get to it when needed? In the latest episode Ray brought one of his gauntlets in a scenario where he didn’t have the full suit. I was happy to see that he finally used some common sense there, though I would have preferred the entire suit. Baby steps I guess.
3. Speaking of going into the field unprepared, Martin and Jax have also been separated numerous times, through their own fault. Either they split up with one leaving the ship while the other remains back, or, they are not physically close to each other when they are in the field, making it somewhere between difficult and impossible for them to create Firestorm. To be fair, in episode 8 Jax wanted to merge while aboard the Waverider and Martin refused saying it would be too dangerous while on the ship. While I’m not sure I agree with that, at least they gave an in-story reason for not merging.
4. Seemingly, the characters and story are done with this plot point, but I would be remiss if I did not mention Martin drugging Jax in episode 1, forcing him to go on this mission against his will. There is no getting around it. I think that was an absolutely terrible decision by the writers. I just can’t reconcile that with Martin’s character up to (and since) that point. If the writers insisted on including that scenario, the obvious choice would have been for Captain Cold to have drugged Heatwave.