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‘Legends Of Tomorrow’: Who’s Captain Of The Waverider With Return Of Rip Hunter?

By Daniel Ketchum
Published on: 08:31 PST, Mar 12, 2017

Legends of Tomorrow will be bringing a bit of conflict in the next episode. They made it a joke at the end of the last one, but seriously…who will the captain of the Waverider be now that Rip Hunter is back? After all, it was originally his ship. However, will Sara insist on keeping command?

‘Legends of Tomorrow’ and Captain Sara

As noted by Entertainment Weekly, Rip Hunter has either been entirely missing, a brain-damaged filmmaker or a homicidal supervillain. This is why Sara Lance – a.k.a. White Canary – had to step up to lead the team as the new captain of the Waverider.

At first, the team experimented with the idea of having Professor Martin Stein – because of his age and intelligence – lead the team, but it was quickly clear he wasn’t up to the task. Sara’s decisiveness and combat skills made her a much better candidate. Even though she was feeling her way along at first, she quickly settled in is the new team leader.

This change in the captaincy on board the Waverider forced the writers to make another major change in the direction the Sara character was going. Ever since her sister Laurel’s death on Arrow, she had been determined to kill her sister’s murderer Damien Darhk in the past, so Laurel’s murder would never take place.

But once Sara was in command of the Waverider, she was also in charge of protecting the timeline from aberrations and changes. This meant it was necessary for the writers to get rid of her obsession with killing Darhk to get her sister back.

‘Legends of Tomorrow’ and Captain Rip

Of course, in the real world, all of this was a consequence of the fact that the actor Arthur Darvill – who plays Rip Hunter on the show – had other commitments outside of Legends of Tomorrow, which meant he couldn’t appear for much of this second season of the show.

Now that Rip Hunter is back on board the Waverider, you might expect – and certainly the character will expect – that he’s going to go back to commanding the ship. But during his absence, things have changed quite a bit – and it might not work out that way.

After all, Rip just spent months killing people, contaminating the timeline and trying to kill the members of the Legends of Tomorrow team, so it wouldn’t be surprising if the crew of the Waverider were a bit reluctant to let him take the lead again. They can’t even be sure that he’s fully recovered yet.

In fact, there’s always the possibility that Rip is still just a mole planted in their group by the Legion of Doom and that the evil Rip will take control again at some vital point in the future and turn on them. So there’s plenty of reason why they probably should be unwilling to hand him the keys to the Waverider again.

As the trailers for this week’s upcoming episode indicate, a clash between Rip and Sara is almost inevitable. Part of the fun of this particular episode will be seeing where everyone comes down on the issue. Will anyone else on the team back Rip returning as Captain, and if so who?

One possible out for Legends of Tomorrow when it comes to this battle of the captains would be to have a situation in which Rip successfully does something to save the team that Sara would not have been able to do. This would show that he was better qualified – at least in some ways – to lead the Legends crew. Alternatively, they could decide to have Rip in charge of the overall team but Sara in charge of – as they call them on Star Trek – away team missions.

[Featured Image by The CW]

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