DC is no stranger to weird television shows and it makes sense. The pages of comics are full of offbeat characters and ragtag teams whose stories lend themselves to interesting adaptations. Take Doom Patrol, for instance. The HBO Max series saw a group of traumatized and weird outcasts with strange superpowers come together and ultimately function as a team (and gave us some wild body horror moments in the process.) Peacemaker also falls into the “weird” category in the best way possible — we would still die for Eagly. But when it comes to the Mt. Rushmore of weird DC tv shows, there is one that is genuinely the strangest of them all — thanks to a giant blue stuffed animal that took down the biggest of bads.
If you didn’t watch The CW’s Arrowverse, there’s a good chance you read “giant blue stuffed animal” and had questions so let me introduce you to DC’s Legends of Tomorrow. The series spun out of Arrow and The Flash and ran for seven seasons and 110 episodes on The CW. It followed a group of time-travelling heroes (some of them being former villains) who have to protect time and history from all sorts of chaos and threats. While the show was a wild ride pretty much every episode and season, the third season introduced what would ultimately be its most bonkers character in Cuddle Me Beebo (or just Beebo for short). The character was initially a hilarious riff on the Tickle Me Elmo craze of the mid-1990s but ended up being a massive fan favorite and would go on to literally save the world in what might be television’s most insane hour ever.
To even begin to explain how a giant plush can kill a demon, you need the rundown on Beebo. Season 3 of Legends of Tomorrow end up having to deal with anachronisms that have popped up in the timeline due to an error they made at the end of Season 2. This unfortunately includes a greater challenge when they have to also deal with the time demon Mallus who had previously been imprisoned in another dimension since ancient times but was released thanks to the Legends and the secret occult society Order of the Shrouded Compass. In the ninth episode of the season, “Beebo the God of War”, the heroes have to track down a displaced talking Beebo toy that had ended up in the time of the Vikings and ended up being worshipped as a god of war.
Nine episodes later, the heroes have a much bigger problem. Mallus has broken out of his prison, he’s killed someone, and is well on track to reach his endgame: unleashing terror, chaos, end endless suffering across time and space. Truly, Mallus was the baddest of bads. In the season finale, “The Good, the Bad, and the Cuddly”, the Legends have one final shot to take Mallus down. Mallus has given the heroes a deadline to bring him the totems that are key to killing him by noon or he will destroy a town. The heroes decide to try to stop him by using the totems to create a “champion” to kill the demon, but it doesn’t work, not at first. The deadline expires, Mallus comes to collect, and the heroes give creating a champion one last try. The combine the energies of the totem and the champion emerges.
Friends, it’s a giant Beebo doll. A massive, multiple stories tall talking blue plushie kicks the crap out of Mallus and ultimately kills the demon. It was probably the weirdest moment on the series to date and somehow, oddly perfect and gave television an iconic fight for the ages.
Those three minutes of plushie versus demon battle are still some of the wildest of DC television and are some of the best for all of Legends of Tomorrow as well. Unfortunately, Legends never fully managed top that absolutely insane season finale. While the series would go on to run for four more seasons, Season 4 marked a major tonal shift from comic booky, time travel adventure into something much more rooted in magic and even weirder elements that didn’t always work. Season 3 also saw the departure of major characters while Season 4 made John Constantine a focus. Later seasons would make things even weirder than Beebo ever dreamed of being, at one point even taking the heroes into space for a truly bizarre alien storyline.
None of this is to say that seasons four and beyond were bad. They were some truly great episodes and moments, but the series just wasn’t the same. Something about Season 3 and the way it neatly wrapped up a lot of character arcs and left the team in a pretty good place overall was only strengthened by its embrace of the fully weird with the giant Beebo. When the show returned, it simply felt like a different series, one that was somehow more serious in its insanity even as it embraced more and more weirdness. By the time Legends got to Season 7, the show was barely recognizable and a list minute introduction of Booster Gold (“Mike” played by Donald Faison) wasn’t enough to save the series. It was cancelled on a cliffhanger, with the rest of the Arrowverse concluding a year later.
Despite this, Beebo remains one of the most iconic elements of Legends of Tomorrow. In the years since his debut and defeat of Mallus, the character has remained a fan favorite. Quite possibly the weirdest thing DC has ever done on television managed to achieve icon status, making him perhaps the greatest Legend of them all.
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