Legends of Tomorrow Confirms Astra as Season 5 Big Bad

Legends of Tomorrow‘s fifth season won’t debut until January of next year, but we have our first official inkling at what the team will be up against. Entertainment Weekly is reporting that Olivia Swann, who plays the show’s older version of Astra Logue, as been promoted to series regular for Season 5.

Given where things left off with Legends, and the fact that she’s among the characters on a recent San Diego Comic-Con magazine cover, some fans probably assumed that Astra would play a bigger role in where the show goes next. At the end of the Season 4 finale, Astra brought the chips containing the souls of famous evil people – including Genghis Khan and Charles Manson – and promptly cast them out of Hell.

“We [have] established that everybody’s welcome on the Waverider because it’s a place where people come to find second chances,” executive producer Phil Klemmer recently told ComicBook.com. “But I think next season, we’re going to deal with some of the historical pieces of s–t that don’t deserve second chances, and it’s probably going to be a tough thing for the Legends to realize. Maybe they’ve started to drink their own Kool-Aid and feel that Genghis Khan was just misunderstood, because whatever he did, he didn’t get a pony for his birthday.”

In the process, Astra’s new role will certainly create a big conflict for John Constantine (Matt Ryan), seeing as he blames himself for her trip to Hell in the first place.

“In the finale, we are going to see a terribly nuanced version of Astra.” showrunner Phil Klemmer told ComicBook.com. “She, unlike most people in Hell, isn’t going to appear evil through and through. Should we have the chance to continue the story next season, there’s a flipside to the coin of this girl — now woman — who resents him and had been corrupted by her experience. She blames him for everything that went wrong in her life. Again, I feel like there’s a chance to get underneath all that. For us, it’s just always about revealing new sides of these characters that you think you know inside and out. I never would have thought that John Constantine would fit in with the Legends and onboard the Waverider, but I think for next season, we want to keep digging deep on this guy, because obviously he feels pretty bottomless. He’s a bottomless pit of darkness, but also, there’s no end to the pathos and the tragedy. There is such a pure impulse to what John does. Beneath all the self-loathing, he’s such noble man. I guess that’s why we keep wanting to know what happens next, because it’s like he’s endlessly fascinating.”

Are you excited to see Astra return in Legends of Tomorrow Season 5? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

The fifth season of Legends of Tomorrow is expected to debut in early 2020.