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Seems to be planned. Elon tweeted in response to Tim Dodd that the engines were "working great" on ascent.

(not a rocket scientist) They didn't need the thrust once they lightened the rocket by burning most of the fuel.

Planned. They wanted to test restarting the engines as if it was reentering the atmosphere.

Definitely planned. If you look closely at the SpaceX stream, the first two engines that were shut down were the ones restarted during the landing flip maneuver.

Too bad about the loss of fuel pressure from the header tank. SN8 wasn't quite on the landing pad, but it was close.

We also didn't see the landing legs deploy, not sure why that didn't happen.

My understanding is that the speed didn't get low enough for landing legs to deploy.