‘Legends of Tomorrow’: Marc Guggenheim Hints at the Justice Society’s Ongoing Role in Season 2
SPOILER ALERT: Do not read on unless you’ve seen Season 2, episode 2 of “Legends of Tomorrow,” titled “Justice Society of America.”
After hinting at in the Season 1 finale, “DC’s Legends of Tomorrow” finally introduced the Justice Society of America.
After the prerequisite “heroes must fight before they team up” scene, the two groups worked together to fight more Nazis and stop the Third Reich from using a super soldier serum — provided by the Reverse-Flash (Matt Letscher), to turn the tide of the war.
At a recent press event, executive producer Marc Guggenheim talked about how the show plans to include the JSA going forward, that character death, appointing a new captain of the Waverider, the Legends’ continued search for Rip, and more.
Can you talk about how you’re going to keep including, if you are, the Justice Society? The Legends can’t just keep going back to 1942.
I don’t want to spoil too much, but I will say we do go back to 1987 and will meet a much older version of Obsidian, who is played by Lance Henriksen. That’s one way. We have another device up our sleeve that I don’t want to spoil because it deals with stuff that is pathology based in the back-half of the year.
We do know that Vixen (Maisie Richardson-Sellers) is going to be sticking around. Anything you can say about how that may come to be, based on how the episode ends?
We’ll deal with it very directly with episode 2×03. We pretty much pick up facing that issue head-on. I think you have a clue to it in Rex’s final words to her. If you’re Vixen, and you’ve got Rex Tyler dying in your arms, and you hear the word time traveler, who would you think is responsible?
When you introduced Hourman in “Legends,” did you know that you’d be erasing him from the timeline so early on?
When we introduced Hourman we actually had a whole bunch of different scenarios planned. That’s one of the things with a time travel show, you almost have to go through more permutations than is normal because of the time travel element. One of the things we talked about was at what point do we show the audience the moments just after 1×16? We had a version of 2×01 that had the flashback but decided to move it into 2×02. We talked about how we were going to reveal the information, all the different ways we could deal with the ramifications of 1×16. We had a lot of permutations in the writer’s room, and this is the one that we went with.
Can you talk a bit about Sara (Caity Lotz) taking on more of a leadership role?
Sometimes with stories for the season, sometimes they work out better than you ever expected and sometimes they’re worse than you expected. I’ve got to give a lot of props to Caity Lotz. As you see her become more comfortable with being the leader of this ragtag group, it’s so fun to watch her. The character is embodying the role of a leader and Caity’s performance really embraces it. It turned out to be one of the most successful things we’ve done in Season 2.
What can you say about Nate’s powers? Obviously, he’s getting them at the end of the episode but can you talk about how unpredictable they might be? It seemed like it was a little bit of a rushed job for Ray (Brandon Routh) to create this.
One of the reasons we wanted to bring Nate (Nick Zano) into the show was we wanted to play with the fun of telling an origin story for a hero. In the evolution of a hero, there are all these fun, seminal moments that we got to put a “Legends” spin on. Some of it is discovering you have powers, part of it is learning how to control those powers, part of it is the first time you go out in costume, part of it is the first time you fail, we wanted to be able to tell all these kind of stories.
Will the team take a more active role in looking for Rip (Arthur Darvill)?
That’s going to be something that is always going on in the background, and in some cases the foreground, in the various episodes. We don’t want to change the mission statement from fixing aberrations to going to save Rip, because the bat’s been taken out of their hand because they don’t know how to find him. Even if they were to say priority number one was finding Rip, I don’t know how they’d go about it given the nature of his disappearance.
You make it sound like we may not see Rip for awhile either. Will we know before the Legends do?
You will find out before the Legends do.
“Legends of Tomorrow” air Thursdays on the CW.
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