'Legends of Tomorrow' Season 3 Premiere Drops a Booster Gold Easter Egg

After two seasons of fans asking when or if we might see Booster Gold on DC's Legends of Tomorrow, the season 3 premiere made an oblique reference to the hero -- a reference that came out of the mouth of Rip Hunter, Booster's own son.

The reference, which was the kind you needed to be fairly attuned to in order to "get," was made when Rip was describing the Time Bureau, the organization he has been running for the last five years of his life in the realigned timestream.

"We are the most important security organization that no one's ever heard of," Rip explains to his former fellow Legends.

If that sounds familiar to you DC Comics fans, it should: Rip's father, Booster Gold, was a key player in the time- and reality-altering miniseries event 52. At the end of that series, Booster got his own series, in which Rip was a key player.

The tagline for that series, which ran from 2006 until 2011 when it was cancelled to make way for the New 52 reboot, was "The Greatest Hero You've Never Heard Of."

In the series, Booster Gold, Rip Hunter, and occasionally other allies and family members lived and worked out of Vanishing Point, a headquarters outside of time last seen (and destroyed) on Legends' first season. They operated in secret, fixing chronal anomalies and operating much the same way the Legends do on TV.

We have commented before about the fact that the Legends' lack of a destiny might not really be a result of their being incompetent, but rather a result of them being extremely good at being Booster-style Time Masters.

Here, it seems that particular bit of "branding" at least has been adopted...just not by the Legends themselves.

Interestingly, Booster Gold got his start by stealing a time machine (something the Legends did this week) and was later pursued by "official" authorities (see the image above). That officer let Booster go when it became clear that he was doing more good than harm to the timestream and the then-present day.

Again...kind of like the Legends this week.

DC's Legends of Tomorrow airs on Tuesday nights at 9 p.m. ET/PT on The CW, following new episodes of The Flash.