The CW’s new show based on DC characters from ‘Arrow‘, ‘The Flash‘, and beyond will deal with the very tricky concept of time travel. The ‘Legends of Tomorrow‘ are a group of heroes tasked with saving the world by Rip Hunter. The team consists of Professor Martin Stein (Victor Garber) & Jax Jackson (Franz Drameh) who together make Firestorm, The Atom (Brandon Routh), White Canary (Caity Lotz), Heat Wave (Dominic Purcell), Captain Cold (Wentworth Miller), Hawkgirl (Ciara Renée), Hawkman (Falk Hentschel), and the time travel guru Rip Hunter (Arthur Darvill) The primary threat is Vandal Savage (Casper Crump), an immortal who would be alive and causing havoc in all time periods.
The thing about time travel is that it can lower the stakes of the show. If a Hawkgirl dies, Hawkman can go back to before her death and save her. The show’s producer Phil Klemmer tried to answer audiences concerns with the rules the show plans to establish in an interview with Screen Rant:
“No, death means death; if you lose that, you get the kind of ‘get out of jail free card.’ You know, we do construct a rule on our show that if you kill me right now with a hatchet, the rest of the team can’t just go on for a show, then go back in time and stop you from hitting me with the hatchet. Our rule is that when try to interfere with events that you participated in, that creates a time paradox, and black holes, and horrible things happen. So we want to keep those tensions alive; when our characters are in moments of mortal peril, that they do have consequences – they they’re not just like, ‘well, it’s Groundhog Day, we’ll start over tomorrow.’”
So if you believe that, the stakes could be very high. There is no single lead of the show so any character could die at any time. That said, it’s a superhero time travel show. Even if the Atom is not directly involved with an event, his grandfather could be and that event could influence his grandfather’s future. We should expect unexplainable paradoxes every other episode, but that’s what makes time travel so fun.
