The Legends have battled demons, gods, and the deadliest creature of all: a unicorn. When the CW’s Legends of Tomorrow has defeated all the villains of heaven and hell, the only way to go is up. Way, way up.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, showrunner Phil Klemmer confirmed that season six of Legends of Tomorrow is moving from time-displaced supervillains to aliens. If you’ve not been keeping up, season five ended with Sara Lance (Caity Lotz) getting beamed up by a mysterious force, which led to speculation that extraterrestrials were coming into the picture. Well, ponder no more!
Klemmer said these new baddies may include aliens from the pages of DC Comics—like the Dominators, which the Legends previously fought—as well as original creatures made for the show. “We would like there to be a whole motley assortment of them,” Klemmer said. “If these were all Dominators, it would get a little repetitive. So we want to do the same thing we did for magical creatures, but for aliens.”
However, it won’t be a repeat of the magical creatures plot. Unlike that season—where the magical creatures weren’t really evil, just misunderstood—these aliens aren’t going to be so morally complex. At least not at first. Klemmer joked that we may eventually “find the emotional complexity of Marvin the Martian.” But he wants to focus less on the creatures to let us spend more time with the Legends themselves, giving them a chance to explore their interpersonal relationships. We’re even set to get a new Legend next season, in the form of an alien conspiracy theorist.
Klemmer added that the team was also inspired by season five’s zombie episode, “I Am Legends,” to play a bit more with genre—like combining American Graffiti with The Blob in a sort of perfect creature double-feature picture show. “We want the variety of aliens to provide the variety of genres that we can inhabit because that’s when I believe the show is at its best—when you’re like, ‘Oh I get it, they’re doing like a John [Woo] episode,’ or like, ‘Ooh, this is a Marie Antoinette,’” he said. .”
Legends of Tomorrow is set to return with season six sometime in 2021. All of the CW shows have been delayed because of the novel coronavirus pandemic, but Klemmer said the writers are hard at work getting the new story together. Season five of Legends of Tomorrow is currently available on Netflix.
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