Spoiler alert for anyone who hasn't watched tonight's episode of Legends of Tomorrow.
Tonight's episode of Legends of Tomorrow goes under the title "The Justice Society of America," so it was already obvious that audiences were going to get to spend time with the rest of the team beyond Patrick J. Adams' Rex "Hourman" Tyler, first introduced in the Season 1 finale. Unfortunately, not everyone got to make it out of Episode 2 alive, as the prophet Hourman himself succumbed to a fatal blow delivered by Reverse-Flash's vibrating hand. And his last words will likely cause some trouble for our titular heroes when new members join the team, particularly Vixen. Here's how executive producer Marc Guggenheim teased it.
We'll deal with it very directly in episode 203. You have a clue to it in Rex's final words to her. If you're Vixen and you've got Rex Tyler dying in your arms and you heard the words, 'time traveler,' who would you think is responsible?
Uh-ohhhh. Somebody's got some 'splainin' to do, and it's likely going to be a lot of somebodies, since the new Vixen's trust in the Legends is going to be extremely low in the near-future. If she thinks one or more of them were responsible for Rex's death, that doesn't bode well for a focused objective on stopping the now-forming Legion of Doom and all other threats. Trust should be easy to come by when everybody's supposed to be a hero, but then Mick and Sara were already bending those definitions a bit.
Seriously, though, what is wrong with Hourman for not offering up a better descriptor for Reverse-Flash than "Time Traveler?" Yeah, I get that he's dying and probably in shock, so it's not as if his brain is set up to make clear and sensible choices on the spur of the moment. But he could have commented on the fact that Reverse-Flash is so fast, which might have set up a potential conflict between the Justice Society and The Flash, with the Legends caught up in the middle. If only he'd just said nothing at all.
Hourman's death is balanced by the hero-emergence of Nick Zano's Nate Heywood, who was able to take on the persona Citizen Steel, because Ray Palmer knows serums. And while it sucks that Rex Tyler wasn't explored more as a character (at least until he comes back in some form), bringing Citizen Steel out gives Legends of Tomorrow a chance to deliver an origin story. Guggenheim went into detail on that front with EW.
In the evolution of a hero, there are all these fun, seminal moments that we want to put our own Legends spin on --- part of that 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. You can safely assume that the reason we brought in Nate was so we could tell those kinds of stories, including the unpredictable nature of his powers. The next episode, 203, really shows how difficult it is for Nate to get his powers under control.
Since Ray saved Nate's life, there's definitely going to be some trust and loyalty there. But what about if Vixen tries to sway Nate with his grandfather's place within the Justice Society? I guess we'll see how it all plays out soon.
Get ready to see Legends of Tomorrow head to the 1980s for a new take on a new hero for next week's episode, and you can find Season 2 airing every Thursday night on The CW at 8:00 p.m. ET. To see when other shows will make their ways to your TVs, check out our fall TV schedule.
