DC’s Legends of Tomorrow: Could the Team Really Retire?

In last night’s episode of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, titled “Too Legit to Quit,” the team was faced with an ultimatum: retire and live happily ever after, or die at the hands of the Evil Gideon that has been hunting them all season. Unwilling to leave the fate of the timeline fully in Gideon’s hands, the Legends spent most of the episode playing along, but with no real intention to retire. Each of them were given glimpses of their futures, revealing a little bit of what life would be like for them if they left the Waverider.

The results were…mixed. Most of the Legends liked what they saw, but Gwyn (Matt Ryan) was told that he would return to the past and still be without the love of his life. Zari (Tala Ashe) would return to her influencer culture and cosmetics empire. Neither of them was especially fulfilled by that.

When the team’s Hail Mary attempt to time-travel without the Waverider failed, a solution was proposed: AI Gideon would not shape the timeline by herself, but would do so alongside the human Gideon (Amy Pemberton), herself a Legend, and the two would be able to offset one another’s blind spots. “A Captain and an AI,” just as the Time Masters intended (back when there were Time Masters). As an added bonus, Gideon invited Gary Green (Adam Tsekhman) to join her, since the two had spent the season building up a romance.

Of course, at the Legends’ farewell/retirement party, things did not go as planned. Upon realizing that Gwyn was being sent right back to the past he had literally invented time travel to escape, Zari and Ava (Jes Macallan) devised a plan to travel back in time and rescue Alun (Tom Forbes) from World War I without Gideon noticing. The logic was that faking his death and allowing him to live off the grid with Gwyn would not substantially alter the timeline, but it would make Gwyn’s happily ever after…well, actually happy.

The human Gideon beats them to the punch, delivering Alan to Gwyn’s side before sending everyone back to their normal places in the timeline. It isn’t long before Gwyn realizes that Alan is actually a robot created by the Gideon AI to fool him, and the human Gideon reveals as much to Gary, explaining that the battle in which Alan died is a fixed point, and any time traveler hoping to change it would face almost certain death. That sets the stage for next week’s finale, as Gwyn sets out to do just that, and the Legends are forced out of retirement literal moments after they started it.

But, really: can they stay retired?

Some of them feel more plausible than others: Nate (Nick Zano) seemed mostly happy with his future, and he could live with Zari in the Totem and still get his big-picture happy ending, while also being a historian and writing a book about time-travel. That all checks out, and given the persistent rumors that Nick Zano will exit the series at the end of the season, his “retirement” one way or another seems likely.

Spooner (Lisseth Chavez) is also a strong possibility. She learned at the end of last season that her mother wasn’t killed, but that she had been abducted by aliens and taken from her mom. A return to her proper time and place, where she can live with that mother and have a real relationship, might seem like a humble ending for a Legend, but the fact that she would still have a key to Constantine’s manor, and could therefore meet with her friends whenever she wanted, is a big plus.

Behrad (Shayan Sobhian) was deliriously happy to see that his future involved using his musical skills to make a difference in the lives of children. Given that he and Zari have identical power sets, it’s plausible that the pacifist superhero could retire from a life of punching bad guys and move on to changing the world in a different way, without substantially hurting the Legends. 

Of course, the complication there is that he and Astra (Olivia Swann) would have to break off their brand-new romance, and it seems unlikely that her 2040 Presidential run would be helped by a relationship with a Behrad who at that point would be a 20-year-old slacker. 

Would Astra really want to be in charge of something again? After all, she walked away from Hell’s throne of her own volition. 

Well…maybe. After all, we have seen in her this season a deep desire to help those who can’t help themselves. The Queen of Hell can’t do that, but a mainstream political leader in the world of the living can at least try.

Zari is clearly a “no.” Even if she does return to her place in the timeline (remember, this is Zari 2.0, and the OG Zari will likely remain in the Totem with Nate), she clearly isn’t happy with her future as a rich, spoiled socialite. If she were to leave the Waverider behind, Zari would likely find a way to use the Wind Totem to be a superhero without all the time travel.

And that brings us to Sara (Caity Lotz) and Ava. The “co-captains for life” saw that their life together could be fairly normal, with a video message from their future daughter. That definitely seems like it would be hard to pass up, but it’s difficult to see a world where Sara and Ava simply abandon the hero’s life. After all, long before the Legends, Sara was the Canary and Ava was working for the Time Bureau. And while the Time Bureau and Time Masters were both thorns in the Legends’ sides, those entities were created for a reason. An evil, time-traveling AI probably explains it pretty perfectly, in fact: time travelers, especially those with the skills and weaponry to change history, need someone watching over them to make sure they don’t get power-mad.

There are some such checks, of course — the people at the Fixed Points. In a previous episode, “The Fixed Point,” Sara discovered that Eobard Thawne (Matt Letscher) had been stationed at a Fixed Point in history, outfitted with a cuff that stopped time, and given the responsibility of stopping any time-traveler who might try to mess with the timeline. He attributed the plan to the Time Wraiths, but those seem like largely mindless creatures driven by a single motivation. It’s hard to see them developing advanced technology and a complicated master plan.

It’s hard to say who might be placing folks at the Fixed Points, but we might found out in next week’s finale, since Donald Faison’s mystery character has been described as someone essentially conscripted into saving the timeline and not really given a choice.

Could it be that, once they returned home, Sara and Ava set something up that would stand in for the Time Master and the Time Bureau? It’s a posssibility. Certainly as likely as the two retiring outright. But there’s one little thing that keeps sticking in the back of our heads: “The Need For Speed,” an episode earlier in the season, in which Zari and Ava bonded over their shared love of organization, and Zari did a deep dive into the Time Bureau and its rules. For a moment there, it almost felt like they were setting up Zari 2.0 to potentially captain the Waverider if anything ever happened to Sara and Ava…!

We’ll find out more next week, in the series finale of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow. The episode airs on Wednesday, March 2, at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.