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While Legends of Tomorrow’s first season was enjoyable, it had more than its fair share of hiccups. The show occasionally suffered from filler episodes, and a pretty predictable on-again, off-again relationship with villain Vandal Savage. This was due in part to Savage’s introduction prior to the show’s pilot. Thus, Legends lacked a certain level of tension and mystery going in. The good news is the show’s producers know this as well, and are working to avoid those issues in Season 2.
In an interview with Comic Book Resources, executive producers Patrick Klemmer and Marc Guggenheim spoke on lessons learned.
“I guess the biggest lesson is, before you break a first episode, it’s really important that you take a step back and think about the ramifications of everything,” Klemmer began. “Because we didn’t do a pilot, it was like stepping on a moving train, and we didn’t know where it was headed. You can change the speed of that train, conceivably you can have people run up ahead and try to move the tracks a little bit, but it’s not easy to do. It’s much easier to do at the incubation stage.
He continued,”we really took our hiatus this year and took the show apart, and rebuilt it piece by piece. We’re much more deliberate, just thinking about where is this going to take us. A lot of the story of Season 1 felt like they were compulsory because we put certain story elements into motion. You killed Rip’s family, you’ve got to avenge that. We said that Vandal Savage is going to ruin the world, we’ve got to stop that. Oh, we revealed who our bad guy is, that doesn’t leave much room for mystery. “
Guggenheim added that because Legends was a crossover series that launched without a pilot episode, “[they] didn’t get to take the time to figure things out.” The trouble was in finding footing from there, as “the learning curve was… it wasn’t a curve, it was a straight line up.” Now that Legends has mileage, Season 2 can build upon the show’s own history .
“So in Season 2, we’ve used the destruction of the Oculus and the Time Masters in episode 15 as a kicking off point for a brand new raison d’etre for the show and for the team. Now, they’re more like time cops,” Guggenheim stated. “They’ve got to do the job of the Time Masters. The Time Masters are no longer a going concern, so the Legends have appointed themselves the job of making sure history is protected from time pirates. It just allows for a lot more fun.”
Because of this, the sophomore effort will move at a different pace.
“In Season 2, we’re realizing we can take it slow, not showing all our cards, letting our story unfold incrementally and really indulging the mystery, and letting our villain or evil forces develop organically alongside our guys, and giving them more room to just be themselves,” Klemmer added. “Because we put such a responsibility on them saving the world, you kind of hated them if they weren’t staying on task. But frankly, the fun of the Legends is when they’re not on task. You want them grab-assing, you want them stabbing each other in the back in a fun way, you want them irresponsible. Allowing them to be the time police and allowing them to screw up, I think it’s going to be lighter — not in a frivolous way, but light in a way that allows us to explore character more than we did last year.”
And boy will they have a lot of characters to explore with the introduction of the Justice Society of America and the Legion of Doom. No complaints, though. The Waverider crew’s shenanigans are sure to offer many more promising adventures when the show returns on October 13.
Images: The CW
