LEGENDS OF TOMORROW Showrunner Discusses The Season Finale, Mallus And How He Sets Up Season 4

The season 3 finale of Legends of Tomorrow, "The Good, the Bad and the Cuddly" airs this Monday and we can expect big changes that will affect both the Arrowverse and the Legends themselves, with a slight turnover in the roster of team members. The Legends will find themselves back in the Wild West battling an unleashed Mallus and dealing with all of the chaos that results from a broken timeline.

Speaking with TV Line, showrunner Phil Klemmer noted that this choice of setting for the finale was very intentional. The Old West is a temporal blind spot where the Legends can hide out when they are on the run, and it also reunites the team with Jonah Hex. But perhaps most importantly, due to how ambitious the finale is and all of the variables that are in the episode, including some the show has never tried before, it was very beneficial for the crew to return to a setting they had successfully handled before. 

Mallus, who has been teased for much of the season primarily through his vessel Nora Darhk, finally revealed himself in last week's episode. And while Klemmer describes Mallus as a fire-hurling demon that flies, he noted that the character's greatest superpower is his ability to burn through visual effects money:  "every moment he’s on screen, you can imagine a pile of cash turning into smoke."

According to Klemmer, Mallus is an ancient evil who takes issue with any being, in this case humans, believing they have ownership over Earth. More significantly though, Mallus foreshadows what we can expect in season 4 in terms of villains, as he allows the show to further delve into the world of supernatural myths and monsters. If the season ends with dark forces unleashed upon the world, then it is easy to see why the Legends would need Constantines full-time help saving the world.  

[Mallus] is a sort of bellwether of bad guys to come in Season 4. Up until this point, we’ve been dealing with earthly and historical bad guys, and we certainly had fun with all of that, but this year we dabbled in the world of the occult, through Damien Darhk and his enterprises. But you know that Constantine is coming onto the show [as a regular] next season, so we want to go deeper, we want Mallus to be used as “the tip of the iceberg.” He is not human, and we want to start playing with the idea that Earth hasn’t always belonged just to our kind.

Klemmer also shared that the totems the Legends have been collecting will not work the way the audience is expecting, adding that it was key for them to remain true to the unexpected quality of the show and play off of what the audience thinks will happen to deliver something completely different. He did however note that the totems will "work in a way that's emotionally and dramatically satisfying," adding that hopefully their use is hilarious and impactful and the appropriate level of ridiculousness. 

Finally, when asked about whether fans can expect to see Beebo during the finale, Klemmer noted that audiences should be on the lookout for our lord and savior: "once you’ve invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in CGI assets, it’s a shame to only use them once." Klemmer said they finally figured out how to continue using CGI assets really well, and this is for example why we continue to see Grodd time and time again. Perhaps Constantine's spells on Beebo will help defeat Mallus. The finale does have the word cuddly in it after all...