Legends of Tomorrow boss previews the 'crazy' genre-hopping midseason finale

Green Arrow, the Flash, and Supergirl aren’t the only ones dealing with a messed up version of reality tonight! While the Arrowverse’s Trinity is busy with the topsy-turvy “Elseworlds” madness on Arrow, the Legends will have their hands full a severely altered timeline in the bonkers and genre-hopping midseason finale of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow (tonight at 9 p.m., right after Arrow).

In the amazingly titled “Legends of To-Meow-Meow,” Constantine (Matt Ryan) and the shapeshifting Charlie (Maisie Richardson-Sellers) try to fix the timeline, which broke after Constantine did the one thing time travelers aren’t supposed to do and changed the past by saving his boyfriend Desmond from being sent to hell. Tweaking that one event means Constantine and Charlie never joined the team, which has a profound effect on the Legends, including Zari (Tala Ashe) inexplicably being transformed into a cat.

Each act of the episode is “a new It’s a Wonderful Life version of going back to the Legends and seeing what they would be like had Charlie never join the team and Constantine never having joined the team,” executive producer Phil Klemmer tells EW. “It’s far from inconsequential the changes that happened.”

As Constantine and Charlie endeavor to set things right without taking Zari’s advice and addressing the main issue or telling the Legends, they essentially encounter three bizzaro versions of the team, which allowed the midseason finale to channel its inner Community and parody a few genres.

“We wanted to sort of lean into different genres for each. I guess, the way you can describe it is there’s an all-female version of the Legends, which is very ‘70s, it’s very Charlie’s Angels; there’s an all-dudes version that is very ‘80s, very A-Team; and then there’s a version that’s super bizarre where there’s nobody as a human being at all,” says Klemmer. “It’s super fun watching Caity Lotz and Jes Macallan being a pair of Charlie’s Angel-style badasses.” As you watch the episode, you’ll see the one scary thing that each Constantine and Charlie-less iteration of the team has in common.

The idea for this genre-hopping midseason finale arose from the fact that Legends of Tomorrow wouldn’t be involved in this year’s Arrowverse crossover. As EW previously reported, the show isn’t included in “Elseworlds” because it’s an ensemble show, which makes crossing over with it more difficult. However, the Legends bosses didn’t want their cast to miss out on the fun.

“The sort of conceit of the episode was sort of all predicated on our realization that we weren’t going to be part of the crossover. So, I think we may have overcompensated a little bit trying to come up with something that felt splashy and crazy. Since we didn’t have anybody to crossover with, we came up with the idea that we could crossover with ourselves, or at least get to experience bizarre versions of the Legends,” says Klemmer. “We also wanted to give our actors something fun to play with because everybody else is getting to crossover and work with the casts of the other shows. That always kind of infuses a lot of new energy into the process. So for our guys, since we didn’t get to have any new characters introduced into our world, we wanted to kind of let them play different versions of themselves.”

DC’s Legends of Tomorrow airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on The CW.

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