Legends of Tomorrow EP Phil Klemmer On the Season 4 Finale

The season finale of DC's Legends of Tomorrow is almost here. The episode, which airs in just over two hours as of this writing, will try to resolve a half-dozen dangling storylines and, based on what we have heard about season five, potentially break the timeline completely in a way we haven't seen since the end of the first season. It might even bring back Season One big bad Vandal Savage (Casper Crump) if some of our detective work is to be believed. It will also, apparently, bring back Astra Logue (here played by Olivia Swan) for a game-changing role.

DC's Legends of Tomorrow executive producer Phil Klemmer joined ComicBook.com to discuss tonight's finale. Along the way we also talked about how Legends of Tomorrow -- a series that feels a little bit like it exists outside of the lines of the Arrowverse's main timeline -- will come together with Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, and Batwoman to be a part of "Crisis on Infinite Earths" next season. You can read that part here.

Why did you guys decided that that was a destination you wanted to take the Legends to for the back half of the season?

I guess we weren't quite convinced it was going to work visually, but once it did, we committed to making it maybe a cornerstone of next season. I guess it was a bit of a test. You never really know what's going to work or not going to work. Everything you do on a show is a test to see if you want to continue pursuing it. I mean, I guess we should have known it would work because obviously Matt Ryan swaggering through strip clubs with hellfire and brimstone floating around him? You're like, "Yeah, that's pretty cool," And encountering Astra all grown up was a twist that we were quite pleased with. And again, Olivia Swan -- you'll see her in the finale much more than you saw her last time. And we were like, "Man, we found an on-screen presence that's to be reckoned with," and the dynamic of Constantine having to again reckon with that innocent little girl that he's been prattling on about for however many years. Finding her as a hard-boiled denizen of Hell, basically kindred spirit to Constantine, you know that's really, really interesting. It's interesting to take away his hopes of salvation for her, and salvation for himself. There's nothing more fun than breaking John Constantine's heart.

And obviously for almost as long as Constantine's been prattling on about it, Matt Ryan has been saying that he really wanted to get back to that story. What was it like telling him, "Oh, yeah, the Astra story's coming back, but not at all in the way that you would expect?"

I mean, he is a consummate professional, and whatever his expectations, he's been trusting of us. And in the finale, we are going to see a terribly nuanced version of Astra. 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.

I feel like in the past, you had talked about having religious upbringing and the fact that your family didn't let you watch TV until you were in your teens. How has that shaped like writing a story where it's literal Heaven and Hell in your narrative?

No, my parents' objection was more academic than religious -- although I will say our resident expert on Constantine was raised Catholic. I do feel like there is a kind of fascination with something that was forbidden. To me, I guess the big challenge with Hell was that it's been done so many ways, by so many things, and there's times when it's done well, and there's mostly times when it's done not-so-well. It becomes something that you don't react to anymore, because it's almost a caricature. I was pleased with the idea that we tried to ground it in an 80's, Wall Street, "greed is good" kind of thing. It was just a fun aesthetic. We could have had a bunch of people run around with horns and pitchforks and stuff but I didn't want it to be a joke. I wanted it to be a place that's cool, because Constantine is cool. A lot of times, things that are scary and wicked do have a sort of strange allure to them. So Hell on our show, it should feel dangerous, but it should also feel like a place that's like New York in the 80's. It's gritty and sexy, and it might just get you killed.

A lot of the season has been about redemption -- between Nora and Constantine's own journey and some other things. If you're talking about continuing in Hell next year, is that a theme that's going to continue on?

I don't know. I mean, I don't want to become too touchy-feely or Kumbaya. For us, the notion that most of these magical creatures -- minus the Shtriga, the handsome, hunky camp counselor witch -- a lot of things in Hell didn't belong there. Most of the bunch, as we found, were just misunderstood. And I'm willing to give magical creatures the benefit of the doubt and to blame it on humans, but next season, when we're going to delve into maybe real world historical villains, I think we're going to have to stop trying to find the good and the bad when it comes to humans. I think that there are some figures that are truly irredeemable. That's an interesting thing for the Legends to bump up against, because I do think there is this impulse -- We have an arsonist and a murderer on our team; we have many murderers on our team. We have people who have done horrible things, and killed their parents, and that doesn't stop Mick Rory from being totally human and sensitive and somebody that... I don't know how the rest of the world feels, but I feel like we've forgiven him as an audience. We sort of established that everybody's welcome on the Waverider because it's a place where people come to find second chances. 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're 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.

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DC's Legends of Tomorrow airs on Monday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW. The series will return to the airwaves in January 2020, likely as part of the "Crisis on Infinite Earths" crossover event.