Legends of Tomorrow’s Klemmer: “Leviathan” Has “The Coolest Thing I’ve Seen on Network TV”

As the last four episodes kick off, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow is preparing to throw fans a curveball starting with tonight’s episode, “Leviathan.”

The team is taking their battle against Vandal Savage to the last space they can: the year 2166, just shortly before Savage’s most game-changing battle and his rise to power. But once they have the tyrant in their sights, what happens?

Executive producer Phil Klemmer teased some unexpected twists and turns in tonight’s episode, and a trailer for the rest of the season reveals that at some point soon, we’ll see Savage himself on board The Waverider.

Klemmer joined ComicBook.com to discuss the series, and to tease a moment from tonight’s episode that he thinks is the coolest thing he’s ever done on TV.

For a guy who didn’t watch a lot of television growing up, you’ve dropped a lot of pop culture references this season. Have you been cramming the last few years?

Yeah! It is like — you know how the Amish kids go on Rumspringa? They have their year of just dabbling with sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll? I guess I’m on the television equivalent of the Devil’s playground.

Has getting a second season put you in a position where you feel like you have to both wrap up the Vandal Savage plotline and also tease Season Two?

You know, the announcement of Season Two hasn’t really changed our plans. In a way, the fact that we were allowed to make this show without having to do your traditional pilot and to then take a deep breath, the fact that we did this outside of the traditional development machine, in a lot of ways we launched an ocean liner. It’s something that’s so big and so complicated that steering it is not easy to do. We knew that we could only head to a single satisfying destination, and it’s all we can do to sort of cram the story we have left to tell into these last four episodes.

So season two will very much be its own beast; it will feel like a new series, a new pilot. One of the benefits we have though is that we can sort of learn from this season to understand where our stories work best, where our characters work best, the dynamics that work, the tone that works. But we knew from the very beginning that it would be a miracle if we could just bring this ship home by episode sixteen and launching the next season will be another matter entirely.

That said, we’ve heard that the mystery hero in the finale will help to launch season two. Does that change Rip’s role at all?

It doesn’t, but Rip’s role will change next season, and therefore the role of the entire team. Their mission was fairly concrete. It didn’t prove simple and it didn’t prove easy, but in the pilot he said, “Hey, you guys are going to travel through time, kill Vandal Savage, save the world.”

Assuming that they achieve that or some percentage of that, and certainly they will incur all kinds of horrible losses in these last four episodes, and the team will be irrevocably changed…but heading into next season, they’re not going to have the same goal.

It’s no longer going to be about saving the world, which I think makes Season Two more interesting because it forces them to ask the hard questions: are we a team? Why are we a team? Are we heroes? Does Rory revert to being a villain? Does Ray go back to being a tech billionaire? Does Rip return to the Vanishing Point? And I think collectively what everybody realizes is that after all they’ve been through, they can’t go back to their previous lives which leaves them in a bittersweet predicament, in that they’re sort of forced to remain together.

The challenge of Season Two will be to come up with a purpose, because once the world is saves, then what? What do you do? Are there any mountains left to climb? Any lands left to counter? And obviously there will be, because we could do 23 of these next season for all we know, so we have to come up with some pretty serious challenges.

We just saw Jonah Hex, who everyone had been anticipating and hoping for all year. Was there anybody else that you had hoped to get around to, but that the story didn’t lend itself to?

There were some notions that we played around with. For a while, we loved Valentina Vostok so much — we loved Stephanie Cornelius in those two episodes she did — and there was a time when we were wondering, “What if we bring her back as Negative Woman?” But we have so many incredible characters just on our ship, it’s a challenge to service all of them. So there really haven’t been the ones that got away last season, and certainly what Season Two provides for us is the chance to introduce new good guys, new bad guys, new stakes, new mythology.

So any regret that I might have felt a couple episodes ago, has now been erased by the fact that we are talking about Season Two and through our collaboration with DC, it feels like the sky is the limit and they’re saying yes much more often than they’re saying no when we ask whether we have access to various characters.

Ray and Kendra’s subplot has taken a huge chunk of the spotlight these last few episodes. With four weeks left, are we going to see any other plots that will jump up and surprise us that way?

I think probably the thing that’s going to grab you with Episode 113 is how close we come to succeeding, and obviously we have three more episodes left, so I don’t think it’s a huge spoiler to reveal that we don’t succeed, but I don’t think I’ve ever worked on a show that flirted with a false finale in the way that this one did. It really feels like this is the last episode of the series and if not for a single turn of the plot, it well could be.

Obviously Vandal Savage just had a big story in the Superman comics. Do you as the custodian of these characters in live action ever pay attention to that stuff to see what other people are doing with it, or is it better to kind of avert your gaze lest you be tempted by the sidetracks anything interesting could provide?

I feel like it’s better to sort of work in seclusion. I mean, very literally a writers’ room is a secluded place where you shut the door every day and it’s eight people telling this tale together. There have been shows where I’ve been tempted to dive deep, to hear what the fans are saying or the critics are saying, and the fact that we’re working in a universe where other people are telling their stories…

There’s a story about how the song “Under Pressure” was recorded. Bowie and Freddie Mercury were in two separate sound booths and they both had the same track, and they both came up with vocal arrangements in total isolation from one another. Then the final song, they engineered this Frankenstein and it’s the most amazing song ever because you have two gifted storytellers doing something totally different with the same melody. That’s the way I look at the rest of the DC storytellers. I think it’s incredible that people can tell such different stories in the same spirit.

So one last thing: did you guys intentionally choose Michael as Rip’s real name as a wink and a nod to Booster Gold?

That’s interesting. That wasn’t me, that was Marc [Guggenheim], but because it was Marc I doubt it was an accident.

And I hope you dig tonight’s episode. There is a giant robot fight sequence tonight that I feel like everybody should watch, even if they don’t watch the show. It’s the coolest thing that I’ve certainly ever seen on network TV.