Legends Of Tomorrow: Who Is The New DC Comics Mystery Character?

News has been leaking out at a crawl about a new character set to join DC’s Legends of Tomorrow in its season finale next month.

The character, played by Suits‘s Patrick J. Adams, will apparently be a “fun” and “beloved” DC Comics superhero whose “mysterious agenda” will set in motion the events of Legends of Tomorrow Season Two.

Of course, since there is a subset of fans who remain convinced that Booster Gold will appear on the series, despite repeated assurances to the contrary by showrunners, the Internet filled up with “Patrick J. Adams to Play Booster Gold” headlines almost immediately — but I had heard almost immediately that wasn’t the case, and a report at TVLine confirmed as much.

Now…who will Adams play? Well, there are some pretty good candidates out there…!

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ALAN SCOTT

Yesterday, buried in April Fools’ Day posts at Bleeding Cool, came a rumor that Adams would play Alan Scott, the Golden Age Green Lantern and a long-standing member of the Justice Society of America.

Today, when the “Fools” and the real news were sorted out, BC maintains that it’s Scott who will pop up at the end of Legends.

Funny enough, Alan Scott seemed fairly out-of-the-blue when the name was guessed by DC Legends TV a day before the BC story broke.

While the JSA have never had the kind of mainstream awareness as their Justice League counterparts, the team’s popularity spiked in the ’90s and early 2000s, after Man of Steel‘s David Goyer, Starman‘s James Robinson, and DC chief creative officer Geoff Johns revitalized the property as JSA, a companion to Grant Morrison’s acclaimed JLA.

For years before that revitalization project, the only two really recognizable members of the JSA to many casual DC fans were Alan Scott (Green Lantern) and Jay Garrick (The Flash), the latter of whom appeared on The Flash this year.

And if they went with the more current interpretation of the character, you’d have the chance to add a gay man to what is already one of the most diverse casts on television and easily the most diverse in superhero TV…which, given Greg Berlanti’s track record, is something he’s likely keen to try.

HOURMAN

Most iterations of Hourman aren’t time-travelers.

That said, there is one — an android from the 853rd Century — who is a time-traveler, and who is outrageously fun.

It’s highly unlikely we’d have the android Hourman show up on TV — if for no other reason than DC’s apparent desire to forget anything in the late ’90s ever happened — but since there was an Hourman TV series in development at The CW about a year and a half ago, I could certainly see a scenario where one of the human Hourmen (Hourmans?) was introduced with a personality and/or backstory a little more reminiscent of the cult-favorite android version.

The fact that it was his face, and not a more human Hourman’s, that appeared hidden in the background of one of the Legends of Tomorrow viral images providing backstory for a prop on board the Waverider could certainly speak in favor of  this theory.

CAPTAIN ATOM

Why Captain Atom?

Well, there are a hell of a lot of elements of the ’80s Captain Atom series that cross over with The Flash and the Firestorm universe. The pair share villains as well as a lot of high concepts, and more than a few times, I’ve found myself wondering when Nathaniel Adam might show up on on one of the CW seires.

Of course, hardcore DC fans will remember that Atom was originally intended to be the big bad in Armageddon 2001, an early ’90s crossover the premise of which feels quite a bit like that of Legends of Tomorrow. A time-traveling superhero called Waverider came back from the future to stop the rise of a metahuman tyrant named Monarch…who used to be a superhero!

Nobody knew just which superhero or what drove him over the edge, so Waverider had to make his way through the DC Universe, peering into the futures of each individual hero. Ultimately, it proved to be Hawk (of Hawk and Dove fame), on account of somebody leaking the ending to the story before the final issue was done, and DC freaking out. But for years, Captain Atom and Monarch remained locked in a strange will-they-or-won’t-they dance of destiny, with Atom finally, briefly becoming the villain in the Countdown to Infinite Crisis disast—err, event.

THE REAL JAY GARRICK

It’s no secret that Legends of Tomorrow is the series with the least passionate fan base of all the DC shows.

Supergirl, Gotham, Arrow and The Flash all have followings that will go to the ends of the (infinite) earths for their series, but it seems like Legends just hasn’t managed to totally capture the imagination of its audience in that way. Plenty of people like it, sure, but it doesn’t seem to have set the world on fire the way many hoped.

So what better way to deal with that, than to tie it more closely to The Flash, generally regarded as the best and most beloved of the five?

Most fans expect that by the end of The Flash‘s second season, it’ll be revealed that the Jay Garrick who betrayed Team Flash and turned out to be Zoom isn’t in fact Jay Garrick…which means maybe there’s hope that the classic hero can show up in his more traditional form.

Cue Legends…

SGT. ROCK

Another candidate who’s likely becuase one of his most notable props showed up on board the Waverider, Sgt. Rock could provide an interesting alternative take on what happend this year.

This time around, it was all about stopping a threat to the future, before it had an opportunity to take root.

What if next year were to take place in the past, and the team was endeavoring to protect the timestream from the interference of someone from the future?

Basically, the team could be battling an evil doppelganger of themselves.

This would also present an interesting scenario where Rip and company could suddenly find themselves aligned with, rather than against, the Time Masters.