Legends of Tomorrow 100th episode script pages reveal a hilarious 'lost' season 1 scene
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
DC's Legends of Tomorrow is taking a trip down memory lane to reveal some "lost" scenes from the titular team's past — and you can dive into one of them right now because EW is exclusively debuting three script pages from the show's landmark 100th episode.
In the Caity Lotz-directed hour, cleverly titled "wvrdr_error_100<oest-of-th3-gs.gid30n> not found," Astra (Olivia Swann) and Spooner (Lisseth Chavez) enter the now-human Gideon's (Amy Pemberton) mind because a virus is threatening to erase all her memories. As they scour Gideon's mindscape for the virus, the duo glimpse previously unseen moments from the show's history that were buried in her mind and encounter some of the Waverider's former crew members, including Rip Hunter (Arthur Darvill), Leonard Snart (Wentworth Miller), Dr. Martin Stein/Firestorm (Victor Garber), Jax/Firestorm (Franz Drameh), Hawkman (Falk Hentschel), Nora Darhk (Courtney Ford), and Ray Palmer (Brandon Routh).
The accompanying excerpt journeys all the way back to the pilot and reveals the team's tense, rowdy first breakfast together after boarding the Waverider. Read the scene and check out Lotz and co-showrunner Phil Klemmer and Keto Shimizu's annotations below.
The CW
1. "[Revisiting] season 1 was easy to do, because for whatever reason, it's indelible," says Klemmer, who co-wrote the episode with Matthew Maala. "I was so stressed out season 1 [that] I remember it. It gets a little murky in the middle seasons. Whoever does the Arrow wiki, we're not joking, we want to give them like a special thanks title card on this one because I had to go back and read so many wiki pages from our own show for stuff I could not for the life of me remember."
2. "[This episode] was an opportunity for actors like Wentworth Miller who left the show in season 1 to get to return to the show and perform scenes, like the one that we shared with you, which purportedly existed in the background of season 1 but clearly is imbued with the tone that would be much more familiar to season 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7," says Klemmer. "We kind of realized that there were people who didn't get to have as much fun as their talents deserved."
Lotz had a blast guiding her former castmates through this scene. "Everybody really was there and down to play," she says. "They were excited to be able to do a different version of their character that got to be a little bit more light and playful. And I think all of them were happy to see each other as well. It was such a reunion."
3. "We did a lot of takes too so that we could play around with the tone," Lotz says of how she helped the returning actors settle into this funnier mode. "Because it was a bit tricky because it's like, what is this humor? How big do we go? How small do we go? And so we just did a couple different takes where everybody got to play with it at varying levels, like being a little more over-the-top or a little more natural with it. And I think that was my strategy, to just let them play with it so that when we put it together in post, we have options."
4. "I was just fascinated by what season 1 would look like through the eyes of season 7 Legends," Klemmer says of Astra's reaction to seeing the original members. "It's like when you go to college, you feel like, 'I'm the only who is having this experience. Nobody has ever gone and lived in this dorm and had all of these life altering moments.' That's kind of like what the Waverider is — it's just a dormitory that's been around. For them to come back to the place that they think of as home and go, 'Wait a second, there was another generation of people here who were so much different than us.' Especially [with] like Sara, it's like going back and seeing your mom before she was your mom and going, 'Mom was crazy!'"
5. "When people wear white, they're kind of asking to get spilled on," Shimizu says of this joke about Sara's original super-suit. "We were just wanting to poke fun at that a little bit, and that she would lose her temper when someone inevitably spilled something on her."
The CW
6. Stepping back into season 1 Sara's mindset was "weird," Lotz says. "She's such a leader now. I like Sara now. I like this version of Sara that is more connected to people and less guarded. So it was actually kind of tough playing. It almost like retrogressing."
Klemmer adds: "I guess the interesting question [raised here] would be: Sara was ready to murder people because she got poached egg on her super-suit, and now Sara is basically the glue that is holding the team together as they're marooned in 1925 and trying to do this arduous cross-country road trip, essentially. It sort of opens up the question, 'Wow, if Sara changed that much in six years, what does it mean for us?' It opens up the question of, if somebody else evolved, it stands to reason that you're destined to evolve as well, and that's kind of a mind-blowing idea because we don't think of ourselves as changing, really."
7. "The whole episode takes place in Gideon's mindscape, so you are tripping through her neural connections," Klemmer explains. "But it's interesting because we kind of realized who was important to Gideon and how she chose to remember them. You realize that Gideon's got her biases and favorites. She loves all the Legends, but she's got a special place in her heart for the people that work on her [like Jax]. The ship's mechanic, they spent the most time together, and therefore he was the most indelible and the fondest of her memories, so he's like the spirit guide that takes us through this journey through her memories."
8. "It's like this is some of our newest Legends getting to see the first iteration of this team and to have that total sense of disorientation of seeing such a different group, and seeing the dynamic being so adversarial and dark, and that these people were just so eager to fight one another," Shimizu says, explaining the significance of the team's stand-off. "There's also something wonderful about the scene, which is it's kind of showing the worst impulses of this group and the fact that they are such a powder keg. The scene is actually really important because it actually makes her say, 'No, Rip, these people are disasters' [in a later scene]."
The CW
9. Both Shimizu and Klemmer also note how this scene highlights some of Rip's deficiencies, like managing personalities.
"He literally took the losers from the timeline, and what did he expect was going to happen, that they were going gonna sing 'Kumbaya' and get along? No!" Shimizu says. "Nor did he make many efforts to create that sort of familial atmosphere. It kind of happened by accident, and it certainly happened after he was gone. It was sort of something that was forged later on. He wasn't necessarily the people person that this team needed."
Furthermore, Sara's closing exchange with Gideon is "kind of the first moment in which season 1 Sara, who never in a million years thought that she would be the captain of this ship, had this moment of recognizing Gideon's authority," says Klemmer. "But I think that was kind of where the seed was planted of Sara being like, 'If Gideon can keep them from killing each other, then maybe there's hope for me to one day manage this team.'"
DC's Legends of Tomorrow airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on the CW.
Related content:
