With the two-part pilot out of the way, tonight’s episode of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow brought fans their first clear look at the team’s dynamic and the world they function in.
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And, yes, we got some insight into that world, including the name of Rip Hunter’s wife, the first time he met Vandal Savage — well, the first time Vandal met Rip, anyway — and the fact that, yes, the World’s Finest are both members of this timeline.
Pretty cool, huh?
So, what did we see? What did we miss?
Read on, and comment below.
STAFF OF HORUS
That staff we see Savage using to fend off Rip’s assassination attempt in the first act is the Staff of Horus, seen previously in the Arrow/The Flash crossover in December.
MEN OF STEEL and DARK KNIGHTS
“I’ve seen Men of Steel die and Dark Knights fall,” Rip tells the team fairly early in the episode.
Obviously, the implication there is that Rip has, during his lifetime, seen the end of Superman and Batman.
…So, what’s that mean?
Well, it’s definitely interesting to imply that Superman could exist in Rip’s timeline when, just this week, we learned that The Flash and Supergirl will cross over in March.
We already knew that Wayne Enterprises exists — at least in the future of the Arrowverse, since it was referenced in a headline on Eobard Thawne’s future newspaper in the series premiere of The Flash.
JONAH HEX WANTED POSTER
Behind Rip in the Time Lab during his conversation with Sara, you can see a wanted poster on the wall bearing the likeness of Jonah Hex.
We will see him in th flesh soon.
The CW’s take on Hex is described as “A true legend of the Old West, a morally ambiguous gunslinger with a penchant for danger. Surprisingly, he knows a thing or two about time travel and the future, but is at home in the Wild West. He’s been battling outlaws and gangs for awhile now, and advises the team to be extra careful when they arrive in the small town of Salvation.”
Salvation, for those who don’t follow the adventures of Jonah Hex, was the name of a Texas town where Jonah became caught up in a battle between a fundamentalist Christian named Sister Agatha who ran the town with an iron fist, and a group of local Apaches.
“Ever since we decided that Legends would involve time travel, we were eager to do a story set in the Old West,” said executive producer Marc Guggenheim when Hex was announced. “But if you’re going to do a story set in the DC Universe version of the Old West, you simply MUST include Jonah Hex in it. We’re thrilled about bringing another well known, beloved DC character to television.”
Hex, currently listed as a guest star with an option to recur, will make his first appearance in the eleventh episode of the show’s first season.
Longtime DC Comics fans will remember that Jonah Hex is no stranger to time travel; despite spending most of his existence as a Man With No Name-style drifter and bounty hunter, at one point the character starred in a series simply titled Hex, in which he was kidnapped by a villain who transported him to a post-apocalyptic, 21st Century Seattle, where Hex operated for a while before being returned to his proper time. He also took place in the Crisis on Infinite Earths.
More recently, he’s interacted with present-day DC heroes and locales both in Blackest Night — Jonah came back as a Black Lantern — and in All-Star Western, where he encountered Booster Gold and ended up thrown into modern-day Gotham City before Booster could find him again and return him to his past.
Booster, of course, is the father of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow Time Master Rip Hunter; Booster and Rip also encountered Jonah during one of their early adventures as partners about ten years ago, when they enlisted his help to prevent the murder of a man whose descendants would one day prove essential to Superman’s survival.
Hex has appeared in a number of animated series, but is likely best known to casual fans as the title character of a much-maligned 2010 live-action movie in which the character was portrayed by Avengers: Infinity War villain Josh Brolin.
WHAT THEY SAID ON THE TITANIC
“It’s the size of an iceberg,” Martin Stein tells Ray Palmer when he’s looking for a fragment of the knife in Kendra’s bloodstream. “I doubt you can miss it.”
“I bet that’s what they said on the Titanic,” Ray responds, drawing a frustrated look from Stein.
Fans of The Flash might remember that, within moments of introducing Jefferson “Jax” Jackson, the young man who would eventually join Martin Stein in the Firestorm Matrix, the character would crack a joke about the movie Titanic.
In “The Fury of Firestorm,” when Stein criticizes Jax’s musical tastes, Jax replies that if Stein prefers Celine Dion, he’s got a copy of the Titanic soundtrack in the back.
Of course, Broadway legend Victor Garber — who plays Stein on The Flash and in the forthcoming DC’s Legends of Tomorrow — actually appeared in Titanic, lending the joke a little bite for fans who have been following the actor…and creating a running gag now that we’ve got the second Stein/Titanic joke tonight.
During a recent visit to the set of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, a group of reporters including myself talked with Garber and, when he was asked what periods in 20th Century history he might want to see his character visit, one reporter suggested — again — the sinking of The Titanic.
“Oh, I definitely don’t want to go back to the Titanic. Oof,” Garber said, suggesting that his character hadn’t had the best experience the first time.
You can see a few more Titanic-related comments Garber made during our conversation here.
SARA’S RESURRECTION
They don’t get too deep into the whole John Constantine thing that makes Sara more functional than Thea, but it’s worth mentioning that, yes, that whole death-and-resurrection thing came from Arrow.
Anybody who’s watching this show without watching Arrow already knows Sara hails from Star City — we saw her telling Team Arrow good-bye in the pilot — but the specifics were pretty hazy.
In the Season Three premiere of Arrow, Sara was murdered by the girl she calls “my friend Thea” in this episode (while Thea was under mind control). About a year later, Thea and Sara’s sister Laurel teamed up to bring Sara back via the Lazarus Pit…and then John Constantine had to come in and help retrieve Sara’s soul.
The Lazarus Pit, which belongs to Ra’s al Ghul in the comics, is essentially a fountain of youth, offering him functional immortality and healing wounds. It can bring people back from the dead…but it’s usually not a very good idea, since it makes them unstable and dangerous.
Thea is dealing with that on Arrow now.
ANNA LORING
In the comics, Ray Palmer married Jean Loring. Here, Ray reveals that his dead fiancee’s name was Anna Loring. Previously, we didn’t know her last name.
Apparently in the Arrowverse, Jean Loring’s daughter Anna is the one who was engaged to Ray Palmer — which makes sense, given that the Jean Loring we met in Arrow was a little old for him.
He also says she died in the siege on Starling City when Deathstroke’s men attacked.
ATOM LOGO
That “Atom” logo on the screen when Ray was in Kendra’s bloodstream? It looks familiar…but not from the comics you’d think.
Oddly, it looks quite a bit like the Captain Atom logo used in the 1980s — a character who hasn’t yet appeared in the Arrowverse, although he shares a lot of supporting cast and villains with Firestorm, so a number of people in his orbit (no atomic pun intended) have.
RELIGION OF CRIME?
“Money isn’t power; belief is.”
That’s interesting coming from Vandal Savage who, in the comics, has ties to the Religion of Crime…which is basically just like what it sounds like.
Of course, in the comics, the adherents of the Religion of Crime are big fans of Vandal’s work not as the priest who killed Khufu and Shay-ara, but as Cain, the Biblical first murderer.
EYES WIDE SHUT
“I didn’t have you pegged as the Eyes Wide Shut type,” Rory tells Sara when they barge in on the Greyhill Building to rescue Rip and Canary.
In Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman attend a strange, cult-like costume party held by rich people with strange sexual kinks.
FIXED TIME
When Snart sets about trying to stop his father from stealing the emerald and going to jail for it, all he manages to do is put the emerald briefly in his father’s hands — before he’s arrested by an undercover cop who sets up a sting operation.
He gets the same amount of time in the same prison, and will likely come out of the experience the same way.
Why?
Well, time was fixed around that point.
In Booster Gold (vol. 2) #5, the titular hero goes back in time to save Barbara Gordon from the debilitating injury she suffered in The Killing Joke. It was a dry run before a somewhat more time-altering mission to save Ted Kord from being murdered.
Rip Hunter suggested the dry run, but really it was a set up to prove a point: time, as he told the Legends last week, doesn’t want to be changed. The bigger the change, the harder it is to do, and in the case of Booster trying to stop Barbara Gordon from being paralyzed, he went back over and over and over again, and all he did was very slightly alter the course of events that led to her paralysis at the hands of The Joker.
