Producers sometimes describe the Waverider — the time-traveling spaceship at the heart of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow — as a kind of halfway house for the heroes and antiheroes who find their way there. There are a lot of ways to take that, but one of them is that the Legends who come will, for the most part, eventually go. Such was the case for three characters who left the Waverider last night. Whether or not they will appear in future episodes is up in the air at this point, but for the time being, the show seems to have said goodbye to two performers at least.
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Spoilers ahead for last night’s season five finale of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow. And if you didn’t see it yet, get your tissues ready.
As most fans expected, since she was not listed in the season six synopsis, Maisie Richardson-Sellers, who has been with the series since season two and has played two very different characters, has decided to leave the series to pursue another career. Along with her, Olivia Swann’s Astra Logue got what passes for a happy ending for her, and as fans had expected, we lost one of the two Zaris played by Tala Ashe.
“We knew that Maisie was looking to leave the show, and we knew that we had to say goodbye to Zari 1.0,” executive producer Phil Klemmer told EW. “So it does become a real math equation, making sure all the stories get their due.”
The way it went: in the final scenes of the episode, Zari 1.0 realized that her existence in the reordered timeline was creating a disturbance that threatened Behrad’s life. She elected to send herself back into the Totem to save her brother. After that, the team needed a drink, so they headed back to where they first found Charlie, so that she could rejoin The Smell, her band from her first appearance (“weren’t they dead?” “Who hasn’t been dead at this point?”). After the show, Charlie decides to stay behind and follow her bliss now that she has lost immortality for good. Astra, meanwhile, has always wanted a normal life and never really wanted to be a hero. She gets it, by way of trading John Constantine his soul coin for the keys to his haunted house (haunted, of course, by Astra’s mother).
Swann’s Astra was never really a part of the Legends per se, although she joined the team about halfway through the season in an unofficial capacity when she left Hell and turned her back on the Greek Fates (who proved to be the big bads everyone expected Astra to be). Richardson-Sellers’s Charlie drove most of the season’s plot, and had an emotional sendoff this week — Richardson-Sellers’s second, since Amaya Jiwe left the series at the end of season three in order to make way for Charlie.
“Amaya and Charlie are so different that it’s kind of whatever Amaya would’ve done, you can pretty much guarantee Charlie will do the opposite,” Richardson-Sellers told ComicBook.com earlier this season. “So it’s a kind of beautiful black and white between them.”
Ashe will stay on in the role of Zari 2.0, with her romantic relationship with John Constantine now out in the open. Zari 1.0 will likely be revisited at some point, if only to give Nate a potential jumping-off point if the series were to end or Nick Zano wanted to move on.
DC’s Legends of Tomorrow is expected to go back into production in the fall with an eye toward a spring 2021 premiere date.
