DC’s Legends of Tomorrow season 1, episode 2, “Pilot, Part 2,” featured a tragic twist in its final moments. The cast and producers talk what comes next.
Warning: This story contains major spoilers for Legends of Tomorrow season 1, episode 2, “Pilot, Part 2.” Do not keep reading if you haven’t seen the episode.
Near the end of “Pilot, Part 2,” Vandal Savage killed Carter Hall, aka Hawkman, though he wasn’t able to kill Kendra as well. His death came shortly after Kendra came to accept her feelings for him but before she could tell him.
Why Carter? Why so early?
“The first thing we were searching for was, how do we establish very quickly the stakes of the show, particularly when you have all these people who are so powerful? The idea of losing one of their own spoke to us very strongly,” EP Marc Guggenheim tells Variety.
“It’s always a decision based on what’s gonna give us the most story, and the idea of Kendra losing the person who is helping guide her through this brand new experience of being a reincarnated hawk demigoddess, taking that support system away from her so that A: she’d have to deal with it and B: she’d have to lean on the other members of our team… that really spoke to us.”
Effects on Kendra
Of what the deaths of her son and Carter do for Kendra, Ciara Renee says, “Losing all this, and meeting [her son] in the first place, it allows her to really understand the gravity of the situation, that it does affect other people.
“There’s a big part of her that wants to protect, even if it’s not necessarily a revenge thing; she wants to protect and she’s seeing that the only way that that can really be accomplished is to destroy Savage, because he’s constantly been recklessly destroying other people. I think that sparks something in her where she’s like ‘alright, I’m in this. I have to do this, because there are people out there who are counting on us doing this.’”
EP Phil Klemmer tells THR, “What makes this version of Kendra different [from her past lives] is she has the other Legends. She can be a hero without him, and she has to stand up to Savage alone and vanquish him by herself.”
Moreover, “In 4,000 years, she hasn’t gotten to choose for herself who to love,” Klemmer says. “Over the course of the season, we’ll play with the idea that Kendra essentially is a widow, so is she doomed to live out the rest of this lifetime alone?
“If she kills Savage, does that mean her eternal life ends or will Carter still be reborn? Or can she, for the first time in her long life, choose who to love? You can’t be on a spaceship with eight other people facing life and death situations without the possibility of romance. Numerous characters will face that over the course of the season.”
As for Carter…
Falk Hentschel reveals, “I knew Carter’s fate when I signed on [to the show]. I had to do a pretty cryptic job with it. I was excited about it because it’s not something the network does very often, killing a main character off. That’s something generally reserved for cable, like Game of Thrones.”
Hentschel adds that going out the way he did is “kind of fun” because Carter’s death is “the catalyst for this show to kick into gear. It’s not just about revenge, but it is a big motivator for everybody. Plus, I’m really used to dying onscreen and this was one of the cooler deaths I’ve gotten to do.”
But, Guggenheim previews, “You haven’t seen the last of Falk Hentschel.” Considering the show is dealing with reincarnating characters, the team could easily come across Carter or Kendra in previous or future incarnations.
He adds that “in episode 3 we very clearly state that we can’t go back and just save Carter’s life. Because that would be way too convenient and also, quite frankly, completely vitiate the point of killing off a character in the first place. So we’re very clear about the rules.”
Reincarnations
As for how the reincarnations will work with Carter dead but Kendra alive, Guggenheim tells TVLine, “It gets a little complicated because he died ‘out of time’ essentially. He didn’t die in 2016” but in 1975. “But the way that the reincarnation works is once they both die, that’s when the clock gets reset for them, and that’s when two babies are born.” So Carter won’t reincarnate until Kendra also dies.