DC Legends is going to be coming back this October and one of the characters is going to be undergoing a rather radical change. Captain Cold will be turning villain again, and not so long after he’d been seen as the antihero and then the hero. This sudden shift in focus is going to be devastating for his team, especially Heat Wave. Executive producer Phil Klemmer had this to say:
“It will be about as polar opposite as the Snart that he’s played on our show. We’ve got a cool pitch to justify that version of him, which I don’t want to give away. But it’s going to be really traumatic for Mick Rory, because he has deified this version of his dead partner in his head, and in a way, Snart’s return is his greatest wish come true; but the fact that he doesn’t get the version that he’s held in the back of his mind is deeply unsettling. Rory’s made a lot of progress as well in the meantime, but he’s certainly not ready to call himself a hero.” (Schwerdtfeger, 2017)
This sudden about face that Snart will pull will affect the rest of the team in a way that is easy to imagine but will impact Heat Wave the most since the two were partners and close friends. After all they were villains together for quite some time, it stands to reason that Heat Wave will be a little torn up inside at this sudden reversal and might even start second-guessing himself.
Signs already point to the opposite of this happening but the fact that is that a sudden shift like this could severely damage the team in a number of ways, but none of them could be counted as being good. This definitely marks another milestone in comics and comic book-inspired shows though, since for a long, long time there has been the distinction between good and evil that has hardly ever been crossed. The formula has never really been challenged up until the recent decades, and the shaking up of the various roles within the comic book world has come as a bit of a shock to some but as a breath of fresh air to others.
It’s important to change it up every now and then to keep things interesting, and Captain Cold’s sudden switch back to evil is bound to take the show in another direction that can only add to its ratings. Let’s face it, people get tired of the same old thing after a while and want to see something edgy, something new. If it takes a heel turn to make that happen then it’s what has to happen. Some fans might prefer to see a villain turned hero remain a hero but if you get right down to it the problem with that is the fact that villains tend to become the bad guy for a reason. Once they go down that path a lot of them have no intention of ever coming back and some couldn’t if they tried.
Captain Cold is a villain deep down, remember that.
