Legacies Teases a World Without Hope in Season 2 Trailer

Legacies ended its first season with a massive status quo shift. In order to save the world from Malivore, Hope Mikaelson (Danielle Rose Russell) sacrificed herself in an act that would ultimately make it as though she had never existed. It makes for a serious cliffhanger considering how much of Legacies revolves around Hope and its left fans with tons of questions, but at least a few of them may have been answered thanks to the debut of Legacies‘ Season 2 trailer.

In the trailer we get a glimpse of a world without Hope and it’s one that appears to center a bit more on the Saltzman sisters. The sisters discovered at the end of Season 1 that there is a ritual they will have to participate in when they are little bit older that will result in one of them dying — The Merge.

While the trailer doesn’t reveal too much about the upcoming season, it does seem to hint that we’ll be getting to explore more what Hope’s absence means for those she’s left behind even though they don’t really remember her as well as potentially pay off on something that Russell has previously said she would love to explore: Hope’s dark side.

“I think that Season 2 will definitely explore Hope’s absence in this world and the impact that she does have,” Russell said earlier this year. “I’d really love to explore her darker side a bit after jumping into Malivore. I’m sure it’s taken some sort of effect on her mental psyche.”

Not that Hope was in the best place before Malivore. In The Originals, the series Legacies is spun-off from, Hope lost both of her parents under pretty traumatic circumstances, not to mention being possessed by The Hollow, the spirit of a powerful, evil witch while she was a child and a host of other horrors. They’re events that fans have never really seen Hope deal with, due in part to a time jump between The Originals and Legacies.

“I’d really like to see how Hope handles situations, traumatic situations, more on-screen,” she added. “Because after the death of her parents, we kind of did a time jump, and we didn’t really see that process, and I’d love to see that process explored a little bit more. And I’d also love to see the impact that it has on Hope and Landon (Aria Shahghasemi) because she did it for them, so it’s kind of a beautiful and tragic dynamic that I’m really excited to see more of next year.”

The second season of the series will also see an exploration of more fantastical creatures even with Malivore being defeated.

“We’ve had conversations about demigods and demons and more fantastical creatures,” Plec told TV Line following the season finale. “We’ve also had conversations about creatures with historical implications and literary references. If a book has been written about a headless horseman, who’s to say that the headless horseman didn’t also exist in Malivore’s time?”

“It’s certainly our intention, conceptually, to have a similar structure for the next season,” Plec continued. “Without giving away too much about how or why, we definitely like the idea that things we wouldn’t expect to exist in our little Vampire Diaries universe keep knocking on the door of the Salvatore School and causing problems.”

Legacies returns this fall on The CW.