DC’s Legends Take Flight Again

Intergalactic adventure highlights the new season of a CW favourite

After locating the Loom of Fate and getting back their slain comrades last season, the Legends face an enemy unlike any they’ve encountered as DC’s Legends of Tomorrow embarks on its latest absurd trek through time and space.

This new round of the B.C.-shot series finds the crew of the time ship Waverider going in search of their co-captain Sara Lance (Caity Lotz) after she’s abducted by space aliens—who as it turns out have the ability to travel through time. So it will take the collective powers and then some of her co-captain and significant other Ava Sharpe (Jes Macallan), plus occult detective John Constantine (Matt Ryan), reformed arsonist Mick Rory (Dominic Purcell) and historian Nate Heywood (Nick Zano), among others, to retrieve their leader and save the universe from these intergalactic interlopers.

And these creatures are particularly repulsive-looking, sporting squid-like tentacles, tusks and an exoskeleton, which showrunner Phil Klemmer explains is a nod to old Roger Corman B-movie aliens.

“Our show doesn’t take itself too seriously,” Klemmer explains, “and we wanted to make a point of taking aliens not too seriously, and we didn’t really want it to be heavy or a metaphor for anything. We just wanted them to be stupid aliens because I guess our impulse as writers is… always to come to understand their pathology and to rehabilitate them. And at a certain point, we just had to come up with, ‘How can we have just the baddies be baddies?’

“So, we kind of shed our desire to complicate everything, and so we just wanted to lean back into the kind of frothy, trashy, low-budget alien stuff. But at the same time that allowed us hopefully to find emotional depth with our [regular] characters.”

In addition to the alien-abduction storyline, the new season will feature turns in the director’s chair by Lotz, Macallan and former cast member Maisie Richardson-Sellers as well as the arrival of a new character, a pistol-packing Texan named Spooner played by Chicago P.D. alum Lisseth Chavez.

After six seasons, the actors have gotten to know their characters inside and out and Klemmer says their performances have helped inform how the writers plot their arcs.

“It really becomes a dialogue with the performers,” he explains. “The real challenge comes from a new character before you get to see what the performer’s take is. And so for Lisseth Chavez, who plays Spooner, it’s so interesting because we had the conception of Spooner and we wrote the premiere. But then when we watched the premiere and we hear her voice… that allows you to really start refining it, and our actors are just always digging deeper… The truth is, you could dig in with any of these characters.

“You know, you could have a Gary episode,” Klemmer continues, referring to the time-bureau agent played by Adam Tsekhman, “and you might miss the rest of the characters, but you’ll be wholly immersed in Gary’s world. And that’s the cool thing about our show, is it has a kind of endless ability to mutate itself.”

DC’s Legends of Tomorrow airs Sundays at 8 p.m. on The CW