Entertainment Swindon

Finally ‘Legacies’ is available in the UK to stream on Amazon Prime, the spin-off to the hugely successful Vampire Diaries & Originals. So have the long wait been worth it and is it worth watching Legacies?

Well, to get straight to it, Legacies is not as good as its predecessors, but is worth watching to at least tie up a few of the questions you may have had at the end of The Vampire Diaries & The Originals. It’s more Buffy, than The Originals, maybe this is due to the younger cast focusing on kids, rather than centuries old vampires.

Legacies is an American fantasy drama television series, created by Julie Plec, that aired from October 25, 2018, to June 16, 2022, on The CW. A spin-off series of ‘The Originals‘, part of ‘The Vampire Diaries‘ Universe, and features characters from both that series and its predecessor, The Vampire Diaries. 

Hope Mikaelson played by Danielle Rose Russell, the 17-year-old Hope Mikaelson, continuing the role she originated in the fifth and final season of The Originals.  Matt Davis, also reprises his role as Alaric Saltzman from The Vampire Diaries.

Legacies follows on from The Originals with Hope Mikaelson at the centre of the show. Hope was the daughter of one of the original vampires Klaus Mikaelson and Hayley Marshall who was a werewolf. Hope is the first ‘Tribrid’ with the powers of vampire, werewolf & witch, coming from the most powerful bloodlines of the three communities.

Legacies takes place two years after the final episode of The Originals, where Hope is now a student at the Salvatore School for the Young and Gifted, a school providing a safe haven for supernatural beings.

The Entertainment Swindon gang have sat down to binge the show to see if it’s worth watching. It’s understandable why many Vampire Diaries fans binned the spin-off that focused on Hope Mikaelson, the daughter of Klaus. Vampire Diaries fans will be happy to know that cast members from ‘The Originals’ do feature, obviously Alaric is one of the main cast of Legacies as the headmaster of the Salvatore School, there is also appearances from Freya Mikaelson, Rebekah Mikaelson, Caroline Forbes & Marcel. There are a couple others, but we wont spoil their appearance in the show.

Three seasons into the spin-off, it was clear that the drop in viewers showed Legacies just didn’t have the magic of The Vampire Diaries or The Originals. That said it is worth watching the show through to the end of its forth season. It’s true, the show could have been done a lot better, but that said Legacies is canon with connections to both of its previous shows it follows on from.

It is difficult to see how Legacies didn’t gain the same popularity as its predecessors, but low ratings in the first two seasons showed episodes were much lower than both The Vampire Diaries and The Originals, it did have potential, but storylines just didn’t give the fans what they wanted, and seemed to target a much younger audience with a more Buffy the Vampire Slayer puffy storylines and less of the horror of The Vampire Diaries and The Originals, along with maybe they just ran out of fresh ideas.

By season 3, the show was unrecognisable in its relationship to Vampire Diaries, it had drifted so far from the original shows, it was more like Buffy meets Twilight. Legacies drifted from Vampires, Witches and Werewolf’s and became saturated with every supernatural beast imaginable which looses the connection between the main characters and the fans.

Both The Vampire Diaries & The Originals had great storylines that had depth and lore that helped build The Vampire Diaries Universe, Legacies adds nothing to the original two stories. The biggest failure to Legacies, is that there simply isn’t any stakes!

It took till season four, for Legacies to get that Vampire Diaries connection back with a dark shift where Hope becomes the Tribrid and brutally attacks Alaric. Spoiler, sorry, but hopefully this helps to give you motivation to see Legacies all the way through to the end. Because with all said and done, Legacies is worth the watch.

The Buffyness of the show definitely owes its problem to the series being set in the Salvatore School with a bunch of young kids. Yes The Vampire Diaries and The Originals cast were also teenage kids, but there were core adult cast members too, in fact, the core cast were mostly adult, the Mikaelson’s and Salvatore’s being the main central cast members, the show was also just more adult and was unafraid of tragic endings and killing off core cast members, even if brought back later on.

With Legacies mainly made up of a young cast, there seemed a lack of consequences of actions by the main characters was due to the writers not wanting to endanger and kill off any of the main characters, a huge departure from what fans of the original shows were used to.

Legacies is now available on Amazon Prime.