Legends Of Tomorrow: Wait, Did They Really Kill Off [SPOILER]?

Note: As you might guess from the title of this post, we’re going to discuss something big that happens on episode 2 of Legends of Tomorrow. Please go watch it first before reading on so you can be surprised and still speculate with us!

When Rip Hunter gathered the eight unlikely heroes and Rogues to go after Vandal Savage in DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, he had to know it was risky business. Savage is an immortal after all, and had already killed off the reincarnating Hawkman and Hawkgirl dozens of times over the centuries. This is a villain who doesn’t play around, and there was always a chance someone wasn’t going to make it back.

I just didn’t think anyone was going to kick the bucket before the end of episode 2.

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Yet our crew of eight sure seemed to have been reduced to seven during “Pilot: Part 2.” Again, if you’d prefer not to have the death given away for you, it’s here where we need to give our final spoiler warning.

Very well.

In the climactic scene of episode 2, Hawkman decides to go after Savage solo with a dagger he gave to Hawkgirl during their first life together. It’s thought to be the only weapon capable of killing Savage.

After plunging it into Savage’s heart, Hawkman gets an unpleasant surprise as the villain simply pulls the dagger right back out. It will work, Savage says, but only if Hawkgirl is the one doing the stabbing.

That news comes too late for Hawkman, as Savage stabs him with the dagger, killing him and transferring his power (or life force, or whatever) into Savage. Damn. Hawkgirl also meets the pointy end of the dagger, but the rest of the Legends crew is able to get her to a medical bay on the Waverider, where Gideon starts working on saving her life.

So that’s that, right? When Legends of Tomorrow was originally marketed, Warner Bros. and The CW didn’t mention that Hawkman was going to be one of the main characters. It now looks like that might have been on purpose, since he wasn’t going to be sticking around the whole time anyway.

But is Hawkman really dead? His shtick is that he’s fated to keep on reincarnating, so perhaps not. I’m thinking there are three possibilities here:

• Hawkman will reincarnate, but in the present

Even though he died in the past, this is the 2016 Hawkman who died, so he’ll reincarnate somewhere in that time. Because the Legends are going to keep traveling in search of another way to stop Savage, they can’t just go pick him up, especially since they’d have to find him first. So he’s not permanently dead, but Kendra won’t see Carter again until the end of the season.

• Hawkman will reincarnate, but in the 70s

Carter might already be on his way to coming back for his next life, but since he was killed in the mid-70s, he’ll reincarnate there even though he’s actually from 2016. I have mentioned on this site that time travel makes my head hurt, right? Rip Hunter will play party pooper and say they can’t pick him up because they can’t waste time searching for him, or because it would cross the time streams, or something like that. It’s always something. As above, Kendra will reunite with him, but not until Season 1 is complete.

• Hawkman is really dead

Because that dagger is involved, maybe this is a death from which Carter can’t return. That would make it clear the stakes on this series are very real, plus give Kendra a guilt subplot, very popular on the other DC shows on The CW (see also: Queen, Oliver; Allen, Barry). And like we already discussed, it would make the lack of promotion for Hawkman when the show was first announced make that much more sense in retrospect.

Next: Legends of Tomorrow: Stephen Amell to Appear as Old Oliver Queen

Regardless of which way the writers choose to go, it was a bold move to pull off so early in the series’ run. Not that you would anyway, but you definitely don’t want to miss an episode of Legends of Tomorrow now, because you can’t be sure all of the team members are going to make it back to the present in one piece.