(Spoiler alert: Please do not read on if you have not watched Thursday’s episode of “Legends of Tomorrow,” titled “The Justice Society of America”)
“Legends of Tomorrow” has revealed exactly what happened to Rex Tyler, a.k.a. Hourman (Patrick J. Adams), in the Season 1 finale.
It turns out, he was blinking out of the timeline because back in his own time period of 1942, he has died at the hands of the Reverse Flash (Matt Letscher).
“When we introduced Hourman, we actually had a bunch of different potential scenarios,” executive producer Marc Guggenheim told reporters following a screening of the episode, regarding the decision to kill off the Justice Society of America leader. “I think that’s one of the things with a time travel show. You almost have to go through more permutations of the story than is normal because of the time travel element … One of the things we talked a lot about was, at what point do we show the audience the moments just after the end of [Episode] 116? We had a version of 201 that had the flashback you saw in 202, we decided to move it into 202 and shoot it as part of 202.”
But naturally, the time-traveling Legends can’t just stay in 1942 to hang out with the JSA, though the show will find ways for the crimefighting teams to interact again in the future.
“I will say that we do go back to 1987 and we’ll meet a much older version of Obsidian, who’s going to be played by Lance Henriksen,” he revealed. “And we have another device that’s up our sleeves that I don’t want to spoil because it deals with stuff that is mythology based in the back half of the year.”
Another big development in the newest episode of “Legends” was the potential birth of a new superhero in Nate Heywood (Nick Zano). After being injected with a variation of a Nazi super-serum thanks to Atom (Brandon Routh), his hemophilia appeared healed and he seemed to be well on his way to becoming his comic book alter ego, Citizen Steel.
“One of the reasons we wanted to bring Nate into the show was because we wanted to play with something that ‘The Flash’ really got to play with in Season 1, which is the fun of telling an origin story for a hero,” Guggenheim said. “In the eveolution of a hero, there are all these fun seminal moments we wanted to put our own ‘Legends’ spin on.
“Part of it is discovering you have powers, part of it is learning how to control those powers, part of it is the first time you go out in costume. The first time you fail, the first time you realize you have a weakness. We wanted to be able to tell those kinds of stories, and you can safely assume that the reason we brought in Nate was so we could tell those stories, including the unpredictable nature of his powers. The next episode really shows how difficult it is for Nate to get his powers under control,” Guggenheim promised.
“Legends of Tomorrow” airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. ET on The CW.