[TV] Who are the Time Masters in “DC’s Legends of Tomorrow” anyway?

I have no idea who the Time Masters are. Are they the Linear Men? I remember the Linear Men because Waverider was angsting about whether he should prevent Doomsday from killing Superman (and then what exactly would they do with Doomsday if he did that?) but let Doomsday kill Superman anyway. But then Waverider should have known that Superman would have come back to life so why was that even a problem?

And then Waverider sent Doomsday to the end of time later on, which again raises the question – why didn’t Waverider do that in the first place, preventing millions of deaths by Doomsday and stopping Coast City from being vapourised and preventing Zero Hour (since Green Lantern went nuts after his city was nuked) and thereby preventing Doomsday from being freed by Brainiac later on which – oh, my head hurts.

So after some digging around (because Wikipedia was no help), I got the info from Comic Vine. So the Time Masters are tangentially related to the Linear Men in their first incarnation. While the Linear Men are the bureaucrats, the Time Masters are the team that actually goes around doing stuff. But then they got wiped out, because their line up wasn’t famous enough.

So Rip Hunter rounded up a more famous group consisting of Superman, Green Lantern and Booster Gold, to go in search of Batman after Darkseid’s Omega Beams zapped him through time in Final Crisis (a convoluted crossover that should not be inflicted on anybody).

But now it seems the Time Masters in “DC’s Legends of Tomorrow” are more like the Linear Men in terms of a governing high council. It’d be cool if Superman appeared as a Time Master, but I doubt’s going to happen.

It’s just three weeks to “DC’s Legends of Tomorrow!”