Legacies: Ted’s Crossing Over Trick Doesn’t Make Sense

Season 4 of The Originals spinoff Legacies featured a canny trick from recurring villain Ted, aka the Necromancer, but the moment doesn’t make sense upon further inspection. For its first few seasons, Legacies was not a lot like its predecessors, The Originals and The Vampire Diaries, in terms of tone. Set in the Salvatore School for the Young and Gifted, the paranormal soap was a fast-paced and comparatively light-hearted series with little of the tragedy and pathos found throughout both The Originals and The Vampire Diaries.

Instead, Legacies had a campy sense of humor that made it stand out from its predecessors, although not all of the franchise’s fans cared for this change. Death was not particularly impactful in the world of Legacies and therefore many plots had little in the way of stakes. However, Legacies season 4 has gone a long way to fixing this issue, killing off series stars Landon and Alaric seemingly for good while also turning former heroine Hope into a bonafide villain.

However, Legacies season 4 still stumbles when it comes to making its knotty plotting add up. For example, the closing scene of  ‘You’re a Long Way from Home,’ (season 4 episode 6) was intended to set up a bombshell ending revelation, but falls apart under scrutiny. In the scene, former foes Landon and Ted debate how to escape limbo only for The Vampire Diaries star Alaric to join them there. This shocking moment proves his character is closer to death than many viewers imagined, but the preceding scene doesn’t make much sense (outside of setting up Alaric’s appearance) due to the confusing rules of limbo’s magical ferryman.

Ted, aka the Necromancer, can’t cross over to the afterlife after death unless he resolves the thing he’s holding onto that prevents him from crossing. Without a token to pay the ferryman, he is stranded in purgatory with Landon seemingly for eternity. However, when he offers the token he earns from his resolution with his “first Chad” to Landon, the penitent Ted proves that he is decent after all and ironically earns himself another token. But that doesn’t fit with the idea of not holding onto things leading to gaining tokens, and as is directly said in the episode “I knew it! Self-sacrifice is always the bloody answer!” And then Ted plans to abandon Landon, which was his plan all along, undoing the whole “self-sacrifice” element. So is Ted is just wrong or is the magic presented wrong? If the Legacies season 2 and 3 villain was granted the token by magic for selflessness, wouldn’t the same magic have been able to tell that the Necromancer was still up to his old tricks and had not changed inside when he promised to stick with Landon? Even assuming the selflessness was seen as him no longer holding onto something keeping him back (an inherent desire to be good?), the reveal of his trick still doesn’t fit.

It is a confusing plot hole since the tokens magically appear and seem to be handed out based on an internal sense of resolution, not an external appearance of goodness. As a result, there is no reason that Ted tricking Landon would also have fooled the ferryman, whose only power and purpose appear to be separating those who can pass through from those who must remain in limbo. In the context of the Legacies season 4 episode, this confusion is brushed aside by Alaric’s sudden appearance shocking both characters and the viewers, but the issue is still never fully explained. Whether Legacies will ever address this issue or The Originalsspinoff will use Alaric’s arrival as an opportunity to avoid the limbo plotline, however, remains to be seen.

New episodes of Legacies returns every week on The CW

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Cathal Gunning
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Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies and TV online since 2020. His obsessions include The Simpsons, Stephen King, the Scream series, and the horror genre in general. He has spent more time thinking about Stranger Things than the writers of Stranger Things, and he has never seen a Star War.

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