Legends of Tomorrow Season 2 New Mission Revealed, Season One Problems Corrected

Legends of Tomorrow Season 2 is shaping up to be a very different show than what we got the first time around. We already know that the inclusion of the Justice Society of America is going to increase the ranks of Thursday’s favorite superheroes, but the changes go far beyond just having a new villain or some fresh faces on the Waverider. 

While at San Diego Comic-Con, we took part in a number of roundtables with the cast and crew, and found out a little about what’s going to be different about Legends of Tomorrow Season 2. Here’s what we heard about the team’s new mission, the show’s new structure, and what they plan to improve on from season one.

“What we’ve done with season 2 is used the destruction of the Oculus and the Time Masters as a kicking off point for a brand new raison d’etre of the show and the team,” Legends of Tomorrow executive producer Marc Guggenheim said. “Now they’re more like Time Cops. Now they have to do the job of The Time Masters. There are no more Time Masters, they’re not a going concern as an organization so the Legends have self appointed themselves to be the people who are gonna do the job of making sure history is protected from time pirates and time criminals. It just allows for a lot more fun.”

And along with the new mission will come something of a new structure for the show, as well. While season one was defined (for better or worse) by its season long arc, season two will be a little more traditional. “The feel of it will be something very similar to what we’ve done on Arrow and on Flash,” Mr. Guggenheim said. “A big bad with central mythology for the season but with more standalone episodes.”

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“With season 2, instead of showing all our cards, letting it unfold incrementally and really indulging the mystery and letting our villain or evil forces develop organically alongside our guys and their mission and allowing them more breathing room to be themselves,” Legends of Tomorrow showrunner Phil Klemmer said. “We put such a responsibility on them with saving the world that you kind of hated them if they were not on task. And the fun of the Legends is that they’re not always on task. You want them stabbing each other in the back in a fun way. You want them to be grab-assing. So allowing them to be the time police and allowing them to screw up, I think it’s just going to feel light but not in a frivolous way, but light in a way that allows us to explore character a little more than we did last year.”

“It’s less of a ‘we have to save the world’ and it’s more contained,” Caity Lotz said. “There’s more bad guy of the week and open/closed, which is nice. It’s going to be great for the show. It’s more fun.”

There were some problems with season one, and the producers are quick to acknowledge them. 

“Legends wasn’t developed the way a traditional show is,” Marc Guggenheim said. “We didn’t have the time to do a proper pilot and figure things out. We were launched off of a crossover. The learning curve wasn’t a curve, it was just a straight line up. One of the things we learned is that Vandal was a tough villain. The idea that you have to try to kill him, but everybody knows it’s 16 episodes. You know Gilligan isn’t going to get off the island.”

“The thing that kicked us off is that they’re trying to prevent the death of Rip’s family, and that really hurt us,” he added. “It put a downer on a show that isn’t as light and hopeful as The Flash but at its best is a lot of fun.”

Some of those concerned were echoed by one of his fellow producers. “Because we didn’t do a pilot, it was like stepping on a moving train and you didn’t know where it was headed,” Phil Klemmer said. “You can try and change the speed of the train, and you can conceivably have people run up ahead and try and move the track a little bit. But it’s much easier to do at the incubation stage, so we really took our hiatus this year, took the show apart, and rebuilt it piece by piece, and we’re much more deliberate.”

“A lot of the story of season 1 was compulsory,” Mr. Klemmer admitted. “We killed Rip’s family [so] you have to avenge that. You said that Vandal Savage is going to ruin the world, you have to stop that. We revealed who our bad guy is so that doesn’t leave much room for mystery.”

The cast seems excited about the show’s new structure, as well. “Last season there were too many people in too many scenes all the time which was really hard on the cast and frankly, really boring,” Victor Garber said. “Except when there’s action and everything. But now the Waverider has been reconfigured a little bit so that there are more rooms. There can be three people in a scene, and they’re very conscious of that. So that’s a big change for us.”

“This year you’re going to see more individualized journeys,” Dominic Purcell said. “We’re going to be pairing off rather than the group doing the same thinge very week around that fucking table, that ship thing. That’s where a lot of the difference is going to be. It’s going to be a very different kind of show.”

“The more characters you have the more difficult it is to shoot,” Caity Lotz said. “Instead of it being everybody all the time, it’ll separate off into these two and these two, so it’ll be a little bit more manageable.” She did promise that there will still be some massive action sequences, though. “It’s gonna be crazy. There’s scenes where everyone is in a big giant fight. There’s like, 15 costumed people fighting.”

Legends of Tomorrow Season 2 premieres on October 13, at 8 pm on The CW.