WARNING: The following contains spoilers for DC's Legends of Tomorrow Season 7, Episode 6, "Deus Ex Latrina," which aired Wednesday, November 17th on The CW.
Time travel rules typically vary wildly amongst different properties, with each one laying out the ways that their specific space-time continuum works. Legends of Tomorrow has spent its entire run constantly building onto and explaining their own rules for time travel, which even differ from that of other shows in the universe, like The Flash. But in the latest episode the show confirmed there is one time rule it shares with another time travel series, Marvel's Loki.
Legends of Tomorrow season 7 stranded the team in 1925 following a mysterious rogue Waverider that exploded their ship. The captain was revealed to be Bishop who, after being kidnapped by the Legends, stole a copy of Gideon and rebooted her so she would return to her prime Time Master mode. With this, Bishop managed to secretly build an exact copy of the Waverider.
"Deus Ex Latrina" followed Bishop's first exciting days on the Waverider until the responsibility of being a Time Master became a curse. He chased the Legends through time and solved their mistakes his way. Gideon, however, saw his ideas as futile and overrode her captain's orders to institute her own.
She instructed Bishop to kill the Legends when they were minutes away from dying at Chernobyl in 1986. Bishop plead with the AI, wondering if killing the Legends would create further ripples in time, but she assured him that due to the magnitude of the catastrophic event, any changes he made to the timeline would not cause ripple effects.
This rule of cataclysms as temporal free-play zones was explored earlier this year on Marvel's Loki, who found Sylvie hiding in apocalyptic events. This allowed her to roam freely without creating a branch in the timeline. Loki experimented with this by traveling to Pompeii and causing havoc mere minutes from the volcano's eruption. His chaos did not cause a branch, proving the theory correct.
Even though the Legends have traveled through time for a long time now, this specific concept is new to the show. Prior to this moment the Legends typically focused on actually affecting -- typically with the best of intentions, if not always the best of results -- fixed points in time, rather than using those moments as a safe house. Either way, it was a great nod to a fellow time travel series. Audiences, however, should not look forward to a crossover anytime soon.
New episodes of Legends of Tomorrow air Wednesday nights on The CW.
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