SPOILER WARNING: This article contains major spoilers for "The Bullet Blondes," the Season 7 premiere of DC's Legends of Tomorrow.
DC's Legends of Tomorrow are about to embark on an adventure like never before. In "The Bullet Blondes," the Season 7 premiere, the team found themselves stranded in 1925 after a mysterious ship blew up the Waverider. Their initial attempts at fitting in promptly went awry, leading them to split up for a spell. Sara, Ava, Nate, Gary, Zari and Behrad headed to New York City to find Gwyn Davies, the father of time travel, while Astra and Spooner stayed behind with Spooner's mom... only for Astra to inadvertently bring Gideon back from the "dead" as a human being.
Speaking to CBR, Legends of Tomorrow co-showrunner Phil Klemmer explained why the team's new predicament makes Season 7 so unique. He promised that the Legends are really, truly stuck in 1925 and revealed how this helped everyone -- from the writers to the crew to the actors -- break out of old patterns. He described the joy of pairing up "neophyte Legends" Astra, Spooner and Gideon and teased the lessons Sara and Ava will learn from their journey. He also previewed Matt Ryan's new character Gwyn, pointed out what makes this version of Gideon different, offered a preview of what's to come in the show's 100th episode and more.
CBR: This year, we find the Legends really, truly stuck in 1925, which means there are some real consequences to their usual shenanigans. What has this allowed you to do with the characters, that perhaps you haven't been able to do before?
Phil Klemmer: Yeah, I mean, it's everything. It's from tiny things -- like, we've shot 1,000 scenes on the bridge. So the actors, they come, and they know how to block themselves. The cameramen know where the lights go. Again, they're very thoughtful, creative people, but you can't help it fall into patterns as a performer, as a writer, but being stripped of those neural kind of pathways that are easy, you have to develop new ones.
It's really interesting, because every single scene takes place in a place where the Legends have never been. Again, our performers are discovering it as the characters are and that adds that kind of verisimilitude, because they're confused. They're on their heels.
The constant struggle of our show is we never want our guys to be confident or capable. We like them to be fuck ups in the best sense of the word, because they're just human beings who happen to be superheroes who are doing the best they can, but they make mistakes. They make mistakes for very human and hopefully relatable reasons. Now, they're making more mistakes than ever and, like you said, the mistakes have consequences, because you don't get the do-over of, "Well, let's just go back and fix it" or "Let's flash this person." Technology makes your life easier, but it also makes you kind of not have to think about things, and so this is the Legends' having to DIY the thing that they always did.
They're just trying to get home, but along the way, they feel obliged to help people. It's interesting, because they're not the people you would have ever discovered. If they had the timeship, it's never like, "Go help this random person in Arkansas in 1925." That person, their problem was part of history, and sorry... but like, if you're stuck there, and you see a person with a problem, that's an interesting moral dilemma. What are we supposed to do? Just pretend like this woman's not in an abusive relationship, or these people aren't being paid what they deserve to be paid because of their gender or their race? Shit!
There are bad things in history that normally -- hey, look, the guys always saw those things, but there were all always bigger crises that diverted them. Because again, it was always about the timeline!, the timeline!, and now there's no timeline to preserve. So they're kind of having to be a little bit more nuanced in seeing regular regular people from history who normally would have been invisible in the context of a larger historical crisis, and being like, "God!", that for these people, their problems are just as big as the big problems that we've been fixing for six seasons.
Previously, each season would have one major problem to tackle, from anachronisms to magical creatures to aliens. Will we see something like that this season, or is the focus more on their current predicament?
Yeah, it's really about them being stuck. They are the anachronism now. They are the thing that doesn't belong in history. Their antagonists are the ones who want them eliminated, because, rightfully, they don't belong. It's sort of forcing the Legends to justify their existence, where, "Is it just about preserving the status quo?"
What do they really want? [laughs] They keep saying that they want to get home, they want to get out of this place, but why? There's no home for most of them to go back to. Astra can't go back to Hell. I mean, Spooner can stay in 1925, but then she'd lose her friends. God knows where Sara belongs anymore. Ava is a clone from the future. Zari is a pop star who doesn't want to be a pop star. Behrad certainly doesn't want to go back to business school.
Again, they've spent so much time doing what they're doing that they don't have any true home, and yet this whole season is predicated on, "We've got to go back home." Their home is, ostensibly, the Waverider, but does it have to be?
The season premiere also splits the Legends into two groups: Sara, Ava, Nate, Gary, Zari and Behrad on their mission to find Gwyn Davies, while Astra remains with Spooner and her mom. Why divide them like this?
I don't know if this was a conscious decision, but the kind of delight we found in having done that was that you put the three neophyte Legends together. I mean, Gideon is the most, because she was just technically born. Spooner came on last season. Astra, officially as of the season before that. So they are the most novice, but at the same time, maybe they have this chance to forge this friendship with each other, and maybe they just have a different way of looking at things that kind of proves even more valuable than the incredibly competent Sara and Ava, because I don't know if being a Time Mistress is any good if you don't have a time ship.
I mean, in a weird way, Sara and Ava are kind of having to learn their jobs all over again. For them, part of that is learning that the people that they were formerly teaching are now the ones who are actually teaching them. It's just that kind of inversion of our team's hierarchy, which was, admittedly, pretty loose. Sara is in charge, but she's not a tyrant, you know? This season is about her and Ava kind of opening up the floor to the younger Legends, because nobody knows what they're doing. [laughs] So it's like, you might as well just throw it all at the wall and see what sticks.
Let's keep talking about Gideon. At the end of the Season 7 premiere, she becomes a real, flesh-and-blood human character. What makes this Gideon different from what we've seen before?
Well, there's the mechanical difficulty of her just having a massive AI smushed into a human brain, which wasn't meant to really hold that vast reservoir of just data. Beyond that, she gradually developed humanity. You know, she was pretty cold and calculating Season 1. She changed with our Legends. Our 100th episode is basically a retrospective of showing how Gideon the computer learned from our Legends' lessons, both good and bad.
But for human, Gideon, this is the first time she's actually experienced life with the team. She has been watching us for her sort of God's eye view. We make very human mistakes and she's been there to catch us when we fall, but now that she's human, she's having to wrestle with those very conflicting human impulses, because everybody's got the head versus the heart! You know things are rationally right but you do the opposite thing because that's what your heart is telling you to do.
So for her, this season is about just struggling to have to live with the messiness. Again, I think it's really sad how she was always kind of apart from the team. Look, they loved Gideon, but they certainly didn't accept her as one and so now she gets to be accepted as one of the Legends, but she also has to experience their confusion. There's nobody left to cook their meals and make their beds and to tell them when to not do the wrong thing. So it's like they're all in this mess together now.
I can't let you go without bringing up Gwyn Davies, Matt Ryan's new character. Tell me a little about him, and how the team is going to be affected by this encounter with someone who looks just like John Constantine.
Well, I think you're going to be shocked at how quickly you forget Constantine, because Matt Ryan brings such a different energy. We started to talk with him about Gwyn -- God, forever, like almost a year ago, because we knew that Constantine was going to end his run. We knew that we didn't want to stop working with Matt. So we came up with this character who we wanted to put as much air as possible between the two, just for his sake and for the audience's.
So Gwyn is kind of the father of time travel and in this season, he is the Legends' best hope at finding their way back home and being able to escape 1925, where they're trapped. But Constantine is kind of all swagger and devilish charm and Gwyn is really isolated; he's traumatized. He's a World War I veteran soldier who -- again, Constantine has all kinds of dark baggage, but Gwyn's, to me is much more. It's not the arch, like, "Ah! Astra got sucked to Hell, and Desmond --!" Constantine, you're like, "They all got sucked to hell because of you. You're an arrogant bastard." Gwyn is just a person who had this terrible heartbreak, terrible misfortune.
We always seem to come back to Tolkien in the show. Tolkien, for him, like the Shire was the world before the Great War, and our Gwyn saw his bucolic home in Wales and left it with all of his lads and came home a man who is traumatized by the war and no surviving lads in the village and haunted by all the things. That's his impetus for time travel, is just wanting to take the world back to a more innocent place.
Of course, we know that the march of the modern world does not -- the gears do not turn backwards. He's a man who's been -- all of our Legends! Again, they're people for whom the real world doesn't offer any kind of acceptance. This whole season is about where he finds his place amongst the Legends. But look, he's a guy who's 100 years older, so it's like, even if he makes his peace with them, he's never gonna feel like one of them.
So it's really interesting to see Matt Ryan like the grandpa of our team, because he sees them all as these modern dilettantes. He doesn't understand why Behrad smokes pot and does yoga. Again, there's some things that he accepts about modern existence, but there's part of him is just a curmudgeon who's just like, "Meh! It was better back in the day!"
The Legends of Tomorrow writers always manage to come up with the wildest storyline. What was something they came up for Season 7 with that shocked or surprised you?
Yeah, look, aliens -- there was a lot of gross-out stuff last season. I don't know why we like secretions and goo and stuff like that. But yeah, we definitely have -- well, look. I mean, the most shocking thing is -- look, there's all manner of robot kind of Terminator freak-out gore in the future, but the most surprising thing is just the old Legends from Season 1 who returned for the 100th episode. I never thought that Captain Cold would be back on the Waverider again, but to me, that is the most shocking in the best possible sense.
Legends of Tomorrow airs Wednesdays at 8 pm ET/PT on The CW.