The CWGet ready for some serious s--t to go down.
Legends of Tomorrow ends its second season tonight, and based on everything we've seen and heard so far, you might want to strap yourselves in for one wild ride.
"The finale is giant. It's the biggest episode we've ever done," star Caity Lotz told us at PaleyFest. "People are going to love it. I don't even know how we did it. When people watch it, they're going to be like, how did this happen?"
In anticipation of this insanity, which finds the Legends returning to 1916 (and the events of the episode, "Fellowship of the Spear") to prevent the Legion of Doom from taking control of the spear and creating the terrifying Doomworld we saw last week, where the Legion was in control, we hopped on the phone with executive producer Marc Guggenheim to get the scoop on just how big this episode is going to be.
E! News: I'm pretty excited for this finale. I heard from Caity Lotz that it's the biggest episode of the show ever.
Marc Guggenheim: It's pretty insane. I think probably what makes it so huge is that we don't have just one team of Legends, we have two teams of Legends, so it's really double the Legends of Tomorrow.
Was it your goal to do a bigger episode than you ever had before, or did it just turn out that way?
I think we always go into the season finale with an eye towards going as big as we possibly can. We certainly wanted to top last year's finale where we were in three different time periods at once and we had three simultaneous fights with Vandal Savage going on. I think a lot of times what happens—and I think it was a good thing, but what happens is the show actually grows beyond even our wildest imaginings, and we end up writing even bigger episodes than we originally intended to.
Other than getting two versions of the Legends together, what are some of the elements that make this one of the show's craziest episodes ever?
You definitely have the return of the fully constituted Legion of Doom, so Snart [Wentworth Miller] and Eobard Thawne [Matt Letscher] and Malcolm Merlyn [John Barromman] and Damien Darhk [Neal McDonough] . There's also, I would say, the surprise appearance of two more antagonists. One antagonist is actually an army, and I don't mean an army like the Germans, I mean like a super-powered army.
We know based on the cast list you posted that Katie Cassidy is in the episode. What can you tell me about her appearance?
I don't want to spoil too much. I'll just say that she makes an appearance for one very pivotal and very emotional scene. It's Katie playing the role of Laurel Lance. She doesn't suit up as a superhero, she's not Black Siren, this is really designed to be a reunion of the Lance sisters.
That doesn't quite go with the time periods we know we're seeing in the finale…
No, it doesn't! I am so mysterious.
What were some of the biggest challenges going into this finale? Obviously you had to wrestle with getting two versions of most of the characters.
I will say that was easily the biggest challenge. You can't clone any of these actors, and while I will say that some of them have digi-doubles, the technology is not such that you can just have them act opposite a digi-double. So in the past, because of time travel and the device of Rip's mindscape, we had some experience of doubling the actors on camera by using memory heads on the cameras and smart technocranes and whatnot, but this was sort of taking that, which was usually just done on the scale of doubling one character and applying it to the entire time. That was definitely tricky, especially since they're not just talking scenes where they're interacting with each other. They're also big action scenes.
I have to give a lot of credit to Rob Seidenglanz who directed the finale. He had never directed an episode of Legends, came in, just crushed it. Easily the most difficult shooting we've ever had on the show with a lot of moving parts. I think what's fun about the episode is he pulls it off so effortlessly that you're watching it and you just start taking for granted that there are two Saras [Caity Lotz] and two Rorys [Dominic Purcell], and you know, you stop thinking about how it got done and you're just into the story and enjoying the story, which is really how it should be.
We saw at the end of the last episode that the Waverider is now toy-sized. What do they do about that? What's the first step to get the ship back?
That's a great question. I would say the answer really lies in how it was shrunk down in the first place, and without spoiling it, I will tell you that the spear was not used to shrink it down.
Will this finale be a big ending or is it more designed to set up season three?
It'll be a lot like last year's finale. The structure's very similar in the sense that, like last year gave you a very definitive end to the story of Vandal Savage. This will give you a very definitive end to the story the Legion of Doom and the Spear of Destiny. But at the same time, just like last year's finale set up season two, this year's finale will set up season three.
Was there any struggle at all with trying to balance the giant set pieces and action scenes with the emotional moments, like the Lance sister reunion?
Truth be told, what we always do at the beginning…like going into the finale, we knew we were going to return to the events of 215, but beyond knowing that, what we really first do is sit down and figure out what are the character beats we want to do? We knew we wanted Sara interacting with Laurel. We knew we wanted there to be sort of a reunion of sorts between Nate [Nick Zano] and Amaya [Maisie Richardson-Sellers], who Nate lost in the previous episode. We knew we wanted Rory to finally have to choose between the team and Snart, so really what we do to create those character moments is we start with the character moments, and we start with a list of all the scenes we want to see from a character perspective, and then as we're breaking out the plot, we start to notice opportunities for where those different scenes can go.
Since obviously we're seeing Amaya again, should we worry about some more permanent deaths in the finale, or some equally tragic events?
I'll tell you two things. I'll tell you that the cast will not be exactly the same in season three that it was in season 2, and I can also tell you that there will be a few deaths in the finale.
"Doomworld" was so much fun. Were there any fun little things or Easter eggs that you wanted to include but didn't get to?
You know, I don't think so. We obviously talked about a lot of different things, but I really do think for the most part we had a chance to kind of fit in just about everything, even like, there were some Easter eggs that were last minute. Like Ray [Brandon Routh] playing the video game. Originally he was just playing a video game, and we were going to get a video game, and someone had the idea, well what if he's playing Dominators, which are the aliens in the crossover. So some of these Easter eggs came in kind of at the last minute. I will say that's part of the fun of an episode of Doomworld, and part of the fun of the shared universe we've created here that you know, you can have those little nods and shoutouts, and then obviously we took advantage of the fact that there was another reality to show what Felicity [Emily Bett Rickards] would be like as a superhero.
I loved Rip just spending all his time in the Waverider making cake. Will we get to see anything more with the cakes in the deleted scenes?
There is an extended version of at least one of the cake scenes, and to be honest with you, I don't remember if it made it to the list of deleted scenes. If it didn't maybe we'll put it up on youtube or something. There was a moment where Rip actually tried the cakes. It took a long time, but it was a lot of fun. All credit to Arthur [Darvill] who was, I think, brilliant in those scenes.
Legends of Tomorrow's season two finale airs tonight at 8 p.m. on the CW.