“DC’s Legends of Tomorrow” returns for its second season on Thursday night with a new twist – the Legends are missing!
Sara Lance, Ray Palmer, Mick Rory and the gang are nowhere to be found, and a man by the name of Nate (Nick Zano) will turn to Mayor Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) for help in locating them.
But, finding the history-protecting Legends isn’t the only task at hand. Set to emerge in the new season is the Legion of Doom – Damien Darhk, Reverse Flash, Captain Cold and Malcolm Merlyn — who will bring trouble for the team.
Ahead of the show’s return, Access Hollywood spoke with Executive Producer Phil Klemmer to learn more.
AccessHollywood.com: How much Oliver Queen are we getting [in the premiere episode]? And, by the way, whose idea was it to get Stephen [Amell in the episode]?
Phil Klemmer: Well, the beauty is we do share a creator and we do share office space. … Obviously he’s got his show of his own, but when it comes to the crossover, you’re pretty much going to get a little bit of everybody. Yeah, so we will be seeing Oliver again then. And, yeah, it’s great seeing Nick Zano and Stephen sharing the – I mean, it’s just bizarre that we decided to start our show without actual ‘Legends’ in it (laughs).
Access: What is your version of Nick’s character, Dr. Nate, like? What kind of a guy is he? What would he be like if I met him in the lobby?
Phil: He’s obviously a very handsome fellow and whenever I’m given an actor as handsome as that I feel immediately obliged to sort of undercut them with various psychological and physical maladies, because let’s be honest, if you’re too perfect, then you’re just detestable. And so, he’s a little bit off center. He’s not the guy that he looks to be on the surface. He does have a little bit of a chip on his shoulder and we really wanted to tell an origin story for one of our heroes because we inherited all of our Legends, sort of not fully cooked, but they’d all undergone their sort of transformation. And we really wanted to be able to tell that first, like the first act of Spider-Man, when Spidey realizes that he’s got powers, because that’s the most fun is watching somebody go from being sort of underdog, sand in the face, wuss, to the guy who realizes, ‘Oh my God. Now I can do all these cool things.’ And then of course, they take it too far and they then have to learn … a lesson in hubris or responsibility with their powers. So yeah, that’s who Nate is. He’s the first like, humanist we have on board because he’s a historian and the fact that there are no more Time Masters and our guys are kind of trying to tidy up the time stream from all variety of time pirates and such, it helps to have a guy whose a bit of a bookworm, [an] impossibly handsome bookworm, albeit.
Access: The Legends are missing at the start of the first episode. Obviously we’re going to need to find them … Is that something that occurs in the first episode? Does it get resolved very quickly?
Phil: It occurs in the first episode. It’s partially resolved. Not all of our heroes are as fortunate as others in their sort of dispersal and part of the mystery will be with us for the better part of the season. I don’t want to name names, but yeah, it’s a funny thing. I have to say, it’s got the weirdest chronology of any TV episode I’ve ever done because it’s got parts that are happening in the present and it has parts that are happening in the World War II era and it has bits that go back to — we have prehistory and Renaissance and [more].
Access: I’m curious if, like last season, there’s going to be one central thing that the Legends are trying to do in the second season? In the first season, it was kill Vandal Savage
Phil: We realized that that made it fairly linear and what we really wanted this season was [for] it to be much more sort of like amorphous. And there are no Time Masters, there’s no immortal bad guy and so they are trying to protect history, but it’s not always clear what that means. Obviously, we’ve sort of announced our Legion of Doom, so there will be a big bad that presents itself, but even their agenda isn’t quite so cut and dried. And, that’s really what we wanted to play with this season is just allowing our team to have like a little bit more fun — like to lean into the wish fulfillment of traveling through time instead of battling a comic book bad guy. Getting to encounter historical figures or marquee historical periods. Giving everybody chance to go to that one place — we all have that place, like, ‘I wish I were born in this time,’ or ‘If I could meet this one person,’ and then of course the fun is realizing that the person you want to have dinner with is a complete a-hole or the period that you thought you’d want to live in is completely repellant.
Access: Let’s talk about the Legion of Doom. … Is there one that’s worse than the other?
Phil: We wanted to make sure that … everybody was like the emotional Kryptonite for like a member of our team because last year, stakes were so epic — and obviously Rip had a relation to Vandal Savage with his family being killed — but for the rest of our gang, it was just like he was kind of an abstraction. And so, with our bad guys, we wanted to give our characters previous personal interactions and real beefs with these bad guys and then, having a group of bad guys, also you have the fun of they’re a den of thieves. They don’t trust each other, and so you have this sort of very slippery agenda between our bad guys and they trust each other marginally more than they trust our Legends.
“DC’s Legends of Tomorrow” airs Thursday at 8/7c on The CW.