Legends of Tomorrow Showrunner Rejects a Major Season 1 Plot Point

In the first season of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Time Master Rip Hunter brought together a team of time-traveling superheroes, telling them that they are legends in the future. Later, it’s revealed that they are actually completely expendable, and have no record of any important impact on history. Hunter has teamed them up in the hopes of stopping Vandal Savage, an immortal enemy who is destined to eventually take over the world, killing Hunter’s wife and child in the process. Ultimately, the Legends do stop Savage, but the implication that viewers were left with, was that Hunter’s family still died.

Speaking with Legends of Tomorrow superfan Tiia (of Tiia Reacts), executive producer Phil Klemmer revealed that, as far as he’s concerned, that isn’t how it went at all. Rip’s family is doing just fine, wherever they are.

“I don’t think Rip’s family is really dead,” Klemmer said. “I mean, that seems too sad. I don’t want that to be true, so whether it’s a fixed point or not, I don’t think that that would have persisted.”

You can see the full conversation below.

Hunter, played by Doctor Who veteran Arthur Darville, sacrificed himself in season three of Legends, saying at the time that “I would very much like to see my wife and son again.”

During the course of Legends of Tomorrow, the team went from their prime directive being “we change nothing” to “sometimes, we screw things up for the better.” In a few cases, the Legends fundamentally altered the timeline, including the season four finale, in which Zari (Tala Ashe) manages to “hack” time, saving her brother and parents from being killed. As a result, her brother Behrad (Shayan Sobhian) got the wind totem instead of Zari, and suddenly she was no longer a Legend (although that did change pretty quickly).

That change presumably changed other aspects of the Arrowverse’s continuity, but those changes were not reflected in The Flash, Batwoman, or other CW series. Then again, when The Flash changed the gender of John Diggle’s child, that didn’t make much of a ripple, either. Either way, the seismic changes made to the timeline by changes in earlier seasons of Legends could easily have “saved” Rip’s family — and even if that didn’t do it, it’s equally possible that one of the effects of Crisis on Infinite Earths was to avoid the dire timeline in which Vandal Savage (Casper Crump) ever came to power.

The seventh and final season of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow is available on DVD, Blu-ray, and Digital now. You can stream the full series on Netflix.