The Season 3 finale of Legends of Tomorrow is fast-approaching, and the climactic battle between the Legends and the forces of Mallus promises to be intense after all the conflicts of the season. The penultimate episode of the season saw Mallus unleashed after he was finally able to escape Nora's body, largely thanks to Damien Darhk's decision to betray the Legends after they trusted him with the death totem. Believing he could save Nora from being consumed by Mallus, Darhk made a very bad decision, and now the Legends (and potentially the rest of humanity) are in a lot of danger.
The trailer for the finale indicates that we're in for at least one epic battle, and Legends of Tomorrow executive producer Phil Klemmer revealed just how much epicness we can expect from the finale, saying this:
It's a little inside baseball, but the goal of a finale is to spend all the money. You can't take it with you. Basically the strategy is, you try to save and save and save and then when it gets to the end, it's a trip to Vegas where you pull out all the stops. For us, it is akin to a crossover, where you need to spend millions of dollars on visual effects and guest casts. Not to spend it just frivolously, but for us we wanted to feel like the season was moving towards something.
Legends of Tomorrow is generally the campiest of the four Arrow-verse shows, and the time travel series can get away with more over-the-top and less realistic effects from week to week than would work on Arrow or even The Flash. If anything, the frequent campiness of Legends of Tomorrow is part of its charm. The end of the previous episode showed that the Legends team behind-the-scenes was evidently holding back on some really remarkable effects for the final conflicts. Mallus emerged from Nora looking more like a terrifying winged demon giant than anything even remotely silly. Phil Klemmer's comments indicate that Legends of Tomorrow didn't blow its whole leftover budget on unleashing Mallus in the penultimate episode.
The third season has been building to the showdown will Mallus, and the Legends haven't had the most luck with the totems so far. Giving one to Damien Darhk was a gamble that unfortunately didn't pay off, and so we can only hope that Sara and Co. figure out a way to harness their power as a group sooner rather than later for the finale. That, or Sara and Co. find a kickass way to defeat Mallus without using the totems, which honestly might be more fun than more totem shenanigans, although I do love Mick as a totem-bearer. We'll have to wait and see.
That said, the Season 3 finale won't just be one blockbuster event that ties everything up with one epic action sequence that shows off the budget. Phil Klemmer went on in his chat with EW to say this about putting the finale together:
For us, it's really intimidating to break a finale because you only have one chance to do it. There's no course correction afterwards. Again, it's about finding the spectacle and spending all the money and having it be a giant blowout, but at the same time finding that emotional satisfaction. We had some cool, deep individual character stories this year, whether it was Sara and Ava's romance, or Zari coming to terms with not being able to save the future that she's from, and Nate and Amaya's impossible romance.
Mallus isn't the only complication facing the Legends as they head into their final episode of the season. The romance between Nate and Amaya still seems doomed, given that he's not the father of her daughters and the Amaya of the previous timeline chose to forget him, but the Legends tend to break the laws of life, death, and time on a regular basis. We do know that Ava -- or an Ava, at least -- will have a part to play in Season 2, since actress Jes Macallan was bumped up to regular status for Season 4. Take a look at the trailer for the finale!
The Season 3 finale of Legends of Tomorrow will air on Monday, April 9 at 8 p.m. ET on The CW. For more important end-of-season dates, take a look at our rundown of when the big 2017-2018 TV season finales are airing. For what you can watch once Legends of Tomorrow is done for the season, swing by our midseason TV premiere schedule and our summer TV premiere guide. If you're not up on the network shows that have gotten the axe, take a peek at our rundown of network TV cancellations and renewals.
