Artistic License History / Legends of Tomorrow

• In the second part of the pilot, Ray Palmer and Martin Stein realize that they can track the missing piece of Ray's supersuit because it emits alpha particles; the problem is that they have traveled back in time to the mid-seventies, when alpha particles were supposedly "unheard of". Alpha particles were in fact discovered in the last years of the nineteenth century. Of course, the idea that you can track something by alpha particle emissions is also an example of Artistic License – Physics.
• In the fourth episode, the team visits the Soviet Union in 1984 in an effort to find out more about Vandal Savage's operations from a Soviet scientist. Ray Palmer, supposedly an educated man, approaches her and, in an effort to gain her confidence, offers to invest in her research. Read that again: to invest in her research. In the Soviet Union. Where all decisions about scientific research and what to invest in were made by the state. For some reason Ray is not arrested as an obvious foreign spy (or lunatic). Then, later, Leonard Snart is walking that same scientist home, and, as they walk down a clean, well-lit street, several cars, including a Volkswagen Beetle, are visible parked along the street. Ask anyone old enough to remember life in the Soviet Union about the availability of foreign cars, or really any cars, in the Soviet Union. It is true that high-ranking Party members would have had access to foreign luxury cars, but no one high-ranking enough to have a foreign car would have had an economy car like a Beetle. Then there is their ability to walk down the street without a care in the world, as though they were not in a police state. Lastly, by 1984 the Soviet Union was, while authoritarian, hardly a North Korea-esque hellhole; not in the major cities, in any case. They received Western tourists with reasonable regularity, and allowed Western media to be consumed legally, as long as it wasn't obviously anti-Soviet. There was even a fledgling punk-movement going on among the youth, in spite of the authorities' attempts to stamp it out.
• In the episode "Camelot/3000", the team visits a shamelessly anachronistic Camelot, including armor and weapons that won't be invented for over seven hundred years. The team historian dresses in period-appropriate clothing, insists that the rest of the team look like they're going to a ren faire, and is very put out when the people of Camelot think he looks weird while everyone else looks normal. While it's normal for Arthurian myth to only pay lip service to history (most stories portray the knights in full plate, for example, despite being set hundreds of years before it was invented), the episode actually justifies it: a time traveler came from the far future to hide an artifact and created Camelot based on the Arthurian legends, knowing that it would be better at protecting the artifact than some minor backwoods kingdom.
• Tokugawa Iemitsu goes from a guy who was pretty definitely gay, to a generically (presumed) heterosexual The Blue Beard. Counts as casual character assassination of some random historical figure most of the audience has never head of.
  • Also the ninjas are dressed like stagehands in traditional Japanese production. Which while the inspiration for their look, wasn't ever used in real life! Stagehands were dressed in unobtrusive garb to make up for scene changes, suspension of disbelief training people to ignore them as if invisible. Thus creating the cultural shorthand: stagehand costume=invisible->ninja's wear a version of stagehand costumes for stealth. In Tokugawa's day, the lack of play happening would have *drawn* attention to them!

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