| “ | I could have chosen any time or place. Of all the people who ever lived, I chose you eight. I certainly hope that you won’t let me and the world down. | „ |
| ~ Rip Hunter recruiting the Legends. |
| “ | Never speak their names again! | „ |
| ~ Rip Hunter killing Vandal Savage once and for all and avenging his family. |
| “ | Sara: Rip. Rip: I’m a little busy at the moment, Sara. Sara: Look you didn’t tell us you were buying us time with your life. Rip: Listen carefully. This gambit will not kill Mallus. It will only delay him long enough for you to make an escape. Sara: There has to be another way. Rip: No, there isn’t. It’s all right, Sara. I should very much like to see my wife and son again. I will miss you, Captain Lance, you and the the rest of the Legends. My one hope is that you all live up to that name. Goodbye. Sara: Goodbye, Captain. |
„ |
| ~ Rip bidding a final farewell to the Legends before sacrificing himself to save them from Mallus. |
Rip Hunter is a major protagonist in the Arrowverse as the overarching protagonist of Legends of Tomorrow. He was a former Time Master who quit the organization and time-travelled to 2016 to recruit 8 “Legends” to help him prevent the immortal tyrant Vandal Savage from conquering the world and murdering his family in 2166. He is the founder of the Legends and the archenemy of Vandal Savage.
His Good Ranking[]
What Makes Him Admirable?[]
- He discovered the Spear of Destiny’s power to rewrite reality and enlisted the aid of the Justice Society of America to locate it and to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands and reality itself being threatened, he broke the spear into four pieces, taking one while having each member of the JSA take the others and scattering them across time to safeguard the pieces.
- He quit being a Time Master following their refusal to stop Vandal Savage from conquering the world in 2166 and stole his old ship the Waverider to stop Savage.
- He traveled to Ancient Egypt to assassinate Savage before he became immortal and although he had him dead to rights, he still couldn’t bring himself to murder someone even the man who killed his family then, but refused to break and tell Savage anything after being captured and imprisoned, instead cleverly escaping the prison and getting out of the time period.
- He traveled to 2016 to recruit 8 people, Sara Lance, Ray Palmer, Jefferson Jackson, Martin Stein, Carter Hall, Kendra Carter, Leonard Snart, and Mick Rory to help him stop Savage and save his family. He revealed to Carter and Kendra, who were the heroes Hawkman and Hawkgirl respectively and arch-rivals to Savage that Savage wasn’t killed when they helped the Flash and Green Arrow kill him as unless they lay the killing blow themselves, Savage will remain immortal and always arise back up from even a single cell, which is why they needed to be the ones to kill him.
- He tracked down the world’s only leading expert on Vandal Savage, Professor Aldus Boardman in 1975 and convincing him to give him his lifetime’s work of research on the potential whereabouts of Vandal Savage.
- He revealed the truth to the so-called “Legends” that he actually stole the Waverider and quit being a Time Master to stop Savage and that the bounty hunter Chronos was sent to bring him in along with the fact that he also lied to them about them being Legends and that he in reality chose them because they had a minimal effect on the timeline. He also revealed his real motives not being out of altruism, but a desire to save his family from Savage and get revenge against Savage for killing them. He also comforted Hawkman and Hawkgirl about the death of Boardman, who was in actuality their son from one of their past lives. He felt remorse for lying to the Legends about their status and manipulating them to join him albeit never actually apologizing for it.
- He warned the Legends not to rush in guns blazing after Savage and risk the timeline when they went to Norway in 1975 where Savage was in a gathering of terrorists, but after they did sent and Ray accidentally left a piece of his suit that Savage found, he showed the dystopian future it had created in 2016, motivating them to get the suit back by contacting Martin’s younger self who was the only one who could track the piece. In the meantime, he then sent Snart, Rory, and Ray to steal the Egyptian dagger that Carter and Kendra could use to kill Savage from a Russian millionaire’s mansion while. Following their capture by the “Russian millionaire” who turned out to Savage himself, he led the Legends on a rescue mission to save them and got Kendra out after Savage kill Carter and nearly killed her as well. He had Gideon repair Kendra and later went to Martin to show him how he talked to his younger self (who had met his current self and had missed a mixer that caused him to meet his future wife) and encouraged him to attend the mixer, allowing Martin’s marriage to be preserved and assuring Martin that he wouldn’t risk his marriage to save his.
- He offered the Legends a chance to go back to 2016 and live out the rest of their lives or continue on their mission to stop Savage and save his family and plotted a course for Savage’s next known whereabouts in time when they all chose the latter to avenge Carter.
- He located the bank holding Savage’s wealth, the oldest bank in the world called the Bruemberg bank, and infiltrated it with Sara to destroy Savage’s funds, but after learning that the Bruemberg bank was staffed by Savage’s warrior cronies, he helped take them down and capture Mr. Blake, being disturbed by Sara’s violent bloodlust caused by her resurrection years ago. However, he didn’t judge her, but was just concerned and assured her she wasn’t a monster, and shared to her the story of him trying to assassinate Savage in the ancient Egypt era and his regrets of not being able to kill him and believing that made him a monster, with Sara pointing out that hesitating to kill the man who killed his family didn’t make him a monster, only showed how much of a good man he was. He interrogated Mr. Blake and discovered the mysterious vessel Savage entrusted the bank with was actually Carter’s dead body and went to the Greyhill Building with Sara to retrieve it and give Kendra a proper burial even though it meant forsaking his mission to find Savage’s wealth, putting the team above his own interest. While captured by Savage’s forces and discovering that Savage used the blood of Carter and Kendra’s previous incarnations to expand the lifespan of his followers, he freed himself when the other Legends arrived and temporarily defeated Savage to buy the Legends time to escape and getting Carter’s body as well so Kendra could have a proper burial.
- He set the Waverider to travel to 1986 for a lead on Savage’s coordinates and defeated Chronos to stop him from tracking them down before having the Legends break into the Pentagon to steal the file containing Savage’s whereabouts. He generated an EMP blast to wipe out all the Pentagon’s security footage after the Legends exposed themselves.
- Although he initially considered his old friend, Time Master Druce’s offer of stopping his mission and having the Legends go back to their times unarmed out of guilt over Carter’s death, Rory, Kendra, Jax, and Stein helped him realize that not only was Druce’s offer a trap, but even if it was genuine, that they including Carter knew the risks and wanted to help save the world regardless and he went back with them to expose Druce and defeat him along with Chronos.
- Upon learning from the file that Savage joined the Soviet Union and was helping scientist Valentina Vostok, he sent Snart and Ray to steal Vostok’s credentials and later had Rory and Stein join them to infiltrate her lab and discover what the Soviet’s were working on. Meanwhile, he also got Sara and Kendra train together and work out their feelings to help them overcome their bloodlust and grief respectively. Upon discovering that the Soviets were trying to create their own Firestorm, he had Snart get out with the thermal core in an attempt to prevent them from succeeding.
- He helped Jax and Kendra create a distraction to buy time for Snart to rescue Rory and Ray from the Koshmar gulag and sent the jumpship to evacuate the Legends after Jax reunited with Stein and Vostok had a nuclear meltdown due to recklessly trying to fuse with Stein.
- He got the Neuromorphic Interface to repair Gideon after Chronos shot them dowm and they were temporarily stranded in 2046 Star City, and sent in the rest of the Legends as reinforcements to save Sara, Oliver Queen, and Connor Hawke from Grant Wilson and his army.
- He defeated John Valor and his Time Pirates after they hijacked the Time Master ship the Acheron and freed the captain Eve Baxter. He also thanked Baxter for giving the next whereabouts of Savage’s location in 1958 Oregon.
- He rebooted Gideon to stop Chronos’ override command from stranding him, Stein, and Jax in the temporal zone and went back to 1960 to recover Ray, and Kendra who had been stranded since 1958. Upon learning Sara had been indoctrinated once more into the League of Assassins, he led the Legends in rescuing her and got Kendra to unlock her powers once more, and after defeating Chronos and Snart revealing Chronos was Mick who Snart couldn’t bring himself to kill after he betrayed the team to John Valor a while back, Rip convinced the team that this was the perfect opportunity to redeem Mick.
- Although he came very close to killing a child Per Degaton in 2147 to prevent his and Savage’s bloodthirsty rise to power and save his family, he ultimately didn’t go though with it, instead pleading with Degaton to not become the monster Savage wanted him to be and returned Degaton to his father and convinced his father to allow the Legends to escape.
- He hid out the team in a fragmentation, a place and time the Time Masters couldn’t see, in the Old West after a redeemed Mick told the team that the Time Masters were now going to send the ruthless Hunters after them all to kill them. He challenged the gangster Jeb Stillwater to a duel and killed him to save the town of Salvation and reconciled with Jonah Hex, becoming friends once more.
- He saved the Legend’s younger selves and loved ones by defeating the Pilgrim with the help of his childhood self.
- He traveled to 2166 to reluctantly stop Savage at the height of his power as the Legends were running out of time with their younger selves out of the timeline, and knocked out and captured Savage when Kendra couldn’t do so since Savage had brainwashed the reincarnation of Carter and held the key to his freedom.
- After learning Savage had time traveled, he traveled to the Time Master’s headquarters in the Vanishing Point since he now had the evidence needed to convince the Time Masters to take action and defeated a brainwashed Carter to save Kendra and took a blast meant for her to save her ans allow her to free Carter and defeat Savage again. He then met before the Time Council and presented proof of Vandal Savage’s crimes against the timeline. However, after escaping from the Time Masters who revealed themselves to be working with Savage and using the temporal supercomputer known as the Oculus to not only gaze into time, but manipulate it as well, he and the Legends set a course for the Oculus to successfully destroy it, although Snart sacrificed himself to do it and this sadly did not prevent Savage from already succeeding once more in killing his family.
- Following Snart’s sacrifice to destroy the Oculus and defeat the Time Masters and the team failing to stop Savage from killing his family, he returned the Legends back to 2016 to continue on with the rest of their lives and apologized for having brought them into this, deciding to continue the mission alone. However, after receiving a transmission from the Legends and them refusing to abandon the mission, he (albeit very reluctantly) agreed to let them back in the Waverider to continue their mission and stop Savage once and for all.
- He comforted Sara about the death of her sister and reluctantly revealed to her that this timeline was the least bad of all possible occurrences as going in to save Laurel would only result in her, her father, and the team’s death. He reminded her that she was one of the strongest people he ever met and stopped from completely giving into despair.
- He figured out that Kendra and Carter were being held captive by Savage in 1944 and led the team to rescue them, and while they were only able to rescue Carter, he vowed to rescue Kendra after the team escaped and regrouped.
- He killed Vandal Savage once and for all and stopped his plan of destroying time itself with three Thanagarian meteors, but when the Legends couldn’t deactivate the last meteor, which would still destroy the world when detonated, Rip took the meteor via the Waverider alone and flew it straight into the sun, being willing to sacrifice himself to save the world. However, he alongside Gideon refuse to let themselves die and he gets Gideon to eject the meteor and divert all power to the time drive for one last jump, saving the world and reuniting with the team.
- He decides to take on the Time Master’s former role and protect the timeline from all threats and welcomes the Legends to either join him or return to their normal lives, complimenting them for deciding to stay, but bidding farewell to Hawkgirl and Hawkman with the rest of the team when they decided to leave and start their lives anew. He also took Mick to 2013 to have a final sentimental conversation with Snart and assured him that he could always take him back here if he wished.
- He led the Legends in protecting the timeline from aberrations (time criminals) for six months until 1942, when he sacrificed himself and the Waverider to save New York from an atomic bomb from the Nazi’s and prevent irreparable damage to history, scattering all the Legends through history except Mick Rory, who was injured and couldn’t time travel, instead putting him into stasis. However, the ship ended up surviving the blast, but was severely damaged and crippled and could only be adequately repaired in 15 years, which Rip wouldn’t be able to survive for that long trapped in the Waverider. Therefore, Rip recorded a final message to the Legends, knowing they would reunite and reactivate the Waverider before taking a piece of the Spear of Destiny and making contact with the Time Drive to escape to 1967.
- He broke free of his brainwashing with the help of Sara, Jax, and Gideon and although he obviously wasn’t in control when he was brainwashed by the Legion of Doom, he still felt immense remorse for the crimes he committed while brainwashed and repeatedly apologized for them. He reunited with the team and warmly met the new recruits, Amaya, and Nate.
- He located Commander Heywood to get the final piece of the Spear of Destiny and he wasn’t really angry when Commander Heywood punched him and offered a chance to talk things out, successfully reconciling with Heywood. In addition, while he and Sara initially got a little conflicted and tense over who was the true captain of the Waverider now, he ultimately accepted Sara as the captain, remorsefully acknowledged his behavior was wrong, and encouraged her to take the lead, telling her how she was a better captain than he ever was.
- He figured out that opening the cargo bay would depressurize the ship and allow the Waverider to reenter Earth’s atmosphere, being willing to sacrifice himself to do so. However, when Commander Heywood got there first, he guided Commander Heywood on what to do so that he could open the cargo bay, sacrificing himself to save the Legends.
- He revealed to the Legends the location of the Legion of Doom’s base in the Vanishing Point based on his previous captivity by them and retrieved the rest of the pieces of the Spear of Destiny from them.
- He prevented Sara from traveling to the Crucifixion to get the blood of Jesus and causing cataclysmic damage to the timeline as the period was one of many that needed were essential to the timeline and couldn’t be changed in any way.
- He rescued an injured Tolkien with Nate in 1916 and convinced Tolkien to help him and the Legends locate the vial of Jesus’s blood the late knight Sir Gawain had found.
- After the Legion of Doom successfully got the Spear and rewrote reality in the new Doomworld, he was shrunken down with the Waverider, but tried to send distress messages to the other Legends. With some inspiration from Gideon, he refused to give up and reactivated the Waverider and was able to locate the other Legends, infiltrating Eobard’s controlled S.T.A.R. Labs with Ray so Ray could get his suit back and enlarge the Waverider so the Legends could escape and break the one rule of time travel, going back to events they participated in (in this case 1916), to get the Spear and prevent the Legion of Doom’s victory even though it would mean they would be erased from existence.
- His past self figures out that the Doomworld Legends weren’t imposters, but the real ones who had traveled back in time which stopped the other Legends from beating and imprisoning them, but instead hearing them out while his Doomworld self explained why they traveled back in time. Both of them repeatedly warned the rest of the Legends when the Legion of Doom attacked not to time jump as that would create an even larger paradox then the one they have already created by interacting with themselves, but when they didn’t listen and the ship was incapacited, they went out to the other with the Doomworld Legends sacrificing themselves to buy the other Legends time.
- He got the Spear of Destiny and regrouped with the rest of the team and encouraged Sara not to fall into despair and believe she was too dark to use the Spear of Destiny just this once when Thawne and his time remnants surrounded them.
- He quit the Legends to form an organization to replace the Time Masters as he had nothing left to teach the Legends and believed they had functioned far better as a team without them, having a heartfelt conversation with Sara and asking permission to leave since she was now the captain, which she granted.
- He spent 5 years creating the Time Bureau, the new organization tasked with protecting the timeline, with the task of hunting down the anachronisms, people, places, and things displaced from their native time periods, that had been created by the Legends previous interaction with their Doomworld selves. He returned to 15 minutes after he had just quit the Legends to save them from dinosaurs in 2017 Los Angeles and informed them of what he had been doing.
- He gave the Legends a tour of the Time Bureau’s headquarters in Star City, 2017 and although he was a jerk about it, he ultimately and very reluctantly decided to let them reform the team and go about trying to fix history, telling Agent Sharpe that while they may have their flaws, the Legends were an effective field unit, and would be needed to help stop the coming threat of the demon Mallus.
- He hunted down reports of a supposed vampire in 1895 London and got the Legends to aid him in discovering an occult society known as the Order of the Shrouded Compass and the mysterious mystic Madame Eleanor who was connected to Mallus and trying to resurrect Damien Dhark.
- Following him breaking out prison after his arrest, he located Wally West and convinced Wally West to join the Legends and help him and them save the universe from Mallus, reuniting with the Legends and promising to atone for some of his misdeeds.
- After convincing Ava to reinstate him as an agent and going with her to stop anachronisms throughout time in the Time Bureau following the death of Director Bennett, he bid Sara farewell as friends again and (albeit very questionably) deleted the file containing the truth about Ava in an attempt to prevent Sara from finding the truth and potentially ruining her relationship with Ava.
- He sent an urgent distress call to the Legends to help him stop Grodd from killing a college student Barack Obama in 1979.
- Although he was initially skeptical, he ultimately agreed to the Legends plan to release Mallus by altering time by making sure Amaya’s village doesn’t get destroy to create the final anachronism needed to free him from his prison and destroy him with the totems, although it sadly doesn’t work.
- Following the Legends failure to defeat Mallus, he sacrificed himself by disengaging the Waverider’s time drive to make it unstable and reach critical mass to consume him and temporarily kill Mallus, allowing time for the Legends to escape using the time drive of the jumpship, bidding a final farewell to Sara and the Legends.
What Makes Him Inconsistent?[]
- He is a manipulative anti-hero and extremist who has done very morally questionable or immoral acts in pursuit of his goals. In fact, his original mission of changing the timeline to defeat Savage that he recruited the Legends for, was as pointed out in universe, both out of his own personal desire to save his family than altruism and deeply hypocritical when he repeatedly chastises the Legends for trying to do the same. Of course he also infamously lied to the Legends about actually being Legends to manipulate them to join his quest when in reality, he chose them because they were effectively nobodies with minimal impact on the timeline if they were removed and only revealed the truth when the Legends were on to him, and while he did eventually apologize for bringing the Legends into this, it wasn’t over his lie, but after they failed to stop Savage from conquering the world. Not only that, but over the course of his missions, he has committed other questionable or immoral acts including:
- Abandoning half of the team to be sent to a gulag to get the thermal core the Soviets had instead of sending aid to potentially get captured.
- Not telling Kendra about Sara’s bloodlust and having them train together to work out their secret dark sides which led to Sara nearly murdering Kendra.
- Convincing Sara to assassinate Stein to prevent the Soviets from using him to create a Firestorm if the team seemingly couldn’t rescue him. While he later changed his mind, his effect on Sara nearly made her murder Stein had it not been for Leonard Snart ironically.
- Kidnapping a child Per Degaton and while he ultimately decided not to murder him, he still used him as a hostage to get his father to allow the Legends to escape.
- Demanding Kendra kill Savage even though it would mean losing a brainwashed Carter.
- Returning the Legends back to five months after they left and departing the Waverider without them by tricking them via hologram into thinking he was with them because he knew Sara’s sister Laurel would be killed within that time and causing the others lives to be a mess and only reluctantly taking them back when they refused to leave the mission unfinished.
- Traveling to 2213 and getting an Advanced Variant Automation clones (Ava) and using her advanced skills to enlist her as a Time Bureau agent, erasing her memory, and lied to that she was from the present, hiring actors to play as her parents, and deleting her file in the Time Bureau and sealing 2213 as off-limits to prevent anyone including Ava from finding out the truth. Each time, an Ava clone died in the field, he would just callously go back to 2213 and repeat the process with another clone, having done it eleven times until the current 12th Ava, Director Ava Sharpe, found out the truth, never apologizing for his actions.
- Firing the Legends and confiscating the Waverider from them due to the accidental anachronisms they including Rip himself created when they saved reality from the Legion of Doom by going back to events they participated in and interacting with themselves, making him quite the hypocrite. He only later “permits” the Legends to keep the Waverider and return to their duties out of a secret ulterior motive that they would probably be needed to defeat Mallus.
- Betraying the Legends and sealing them in the Waverider to prevent them from stopping Damien Dhark’s resurrection to try and expose Mallus at the ceremony as real.
- Allowing Damien Dhark to be resurrected and dozens of his own Time Bureau agents to be killed, callously brushing off the lives lost to Sara which eventually leads to his arrest.
- Not showing real concern over Director Bennett’s death and using it along with Sharpe’s promotion to director as an opportunity to convince her to reinstate him as an agent.
- He sadistically plunged Kendra’s dagger further into the already fatally wounded Savage and taunted him about now being mortal and dying. He was also willing to kill a defeated Chronos in cold-blood with the rest of the Legends, showing his lethality.
- He can be quite the cold jerk towards the Legends at times.
- He has an ego which he demonstrates multiple times and after being confronted by Director Bennett and the Time Bureau, he arrogantly demanded that they couldn’t arrest him since he created the bureau, believing himself to be above the law.
- He has a mischievous side, humiliating Gary by pulling down his pants and stealing his time courier with Wally and burgling the Time Bureau to get his coat back before using time courier to selfishly travel to 1992 in Tokyo to sing at a karaoke bar. While drunk doing this, they didn’t express any remorse for doing this after sleeping it off and getting back to normal and actually enjoyed it.
Trivia[]
- He is one of three Arrowverse heroes to be Inconsistently Admirable, alongside Lena Luthor and Oliver Queen.
External Links[]
- Rip Hunter on the Heroes Wiki
- Rip Hunter on the Arrowverse Wiki
- Rip Hunter on the DC Database Wiki
[]
 Inconsistently Admirable
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