Caity Lotz and Ciara Renee On Tonight's Big Legends of Tomorrow Twist

01/21/2016 09:30 pm EST

Warning: Spoilers ahead for DC's Legends of Tomorrow.

Tonight's episode of DC's Legends of Tomorrow presented the team with a difficult question in the third act.

What do you do when your whole perception of your life, your identity and your mission is turned on its head?

"I chose you all because a hundred years from now, your lives have minimal effect on the recorded timeline," Rip Hunter confessed to the team after their mission in the 1970s went very badly. The team didn't respond well -- but by the end of the episode, they bounced back.

How does that admission -- the change to the very nature of the mission and the show -- impact the characters, though? Well, we managed to ask a couple of cast members during recent interviews, and they had very different takes on it.

"I think that Sara has never been…" Caity Lotz started to say before trailing off. "When they find out they're meaningless, she was never in it because she wanted people to know who she was and to make a name for herself. She doesn't really have that ego issue that a lot of the other characters have," she concluded.

For Ciara Renee's Kendra Saunders/Hawkgirl, who experienced a deeply personal loss in the form of her son during the episode (and who never really wanted to come along in the first place), a lot of her mindset has to be about the relationship with Rip.

"I think that she tries to respect Rip even though he's been a bit duplicitous and he's messed up a little bit here and there," Renee told ComicBook.com's Emily Donn during the Television Critics Association. "She tries to respect him because she sees that he's lost things and she's lost things, and they both have the exact same goal. Out of anyone on the team, I think they have the highest stakes in completing their mission and stopping Savage. So there's already a bond."

DC's Legends of Tomorrow airs Thursday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.

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