Legends of Tomorrow boss offers hope after that Hank twist in the fall finale

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Warning: This post contains spoilers from the midseason finale of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, which aired Monday night. Read at your own risk!

DC’s Legends of Tomorrowwent into its four-month-long hiatus on quite the cliffhanger.

In the bonkers and genre-hopping midseason finale, Constantine (Matt Ryan) and Charlie (Maisie Richardson-Sellers) endeavored to fix reality, which broke when Constantine traveled back in time and broke up with his boyfriend Desmond (Christian Keyes) in order to save him. (In the normal timeline, Desmond was dragged to hell after making a deal with the demon Neron to save Constantine.) Try as they might, they couldn’t find a way to set things right without Constantine reversing what did, thereby dooming his beloved to hell. So, that’s what our favorite occult detective eventually did — but little does he know, Desmond isn’t actually in hell (Read the full recap here).

In the final scene of “Legends of To-Meow-Meow,” Nate’s father Hank (Tom Wilson) — who’s been trying to control the time fugitives that the Legends collect — is golfing when he receives a call about the kaupe’s escape. After scolding his men, he turns to his golf buddy, who turns out to be Desmond, and tells him that there’s been a setback but promises to make it right. “Oh, you better,” says Desmond sinisterly as his eyes close glow red, indicating that Desmond isn’t home anymore, but Neron is (whether or not Desmond is still alive inside his body or not remains to be seen). In other words, Hank is working with the demon that will own Constantine’s soul when he dies.

So, why is Hank in league with a demon? “Hank does evolve over the course of the season, but obviously when you’re making deals with a demon for what appears to be the exploitation of magical creatures, I think we can all say that, at least for the time being, it’s not for altruistic purposes,” executive producer Phil Klemmer tells EW.

Image zoom Jack Rowand/The CW

Even though this final scene seems to confirm that Hank is one of the season’s villains, the situation isn’t so cut and dry. Well, at least it isn’t anymore. At the beginning of the season, the writers definitely intended for Hank to be a foe, but their plan changed as the season progressed.

“When we started out the season, we knew we wanted Nate’s dad to kind of be a bit of a villain. Then something kind of funny happened when we hired Tom Wilson and we saw his chemistry with [Nick Zano], and then we had him sing a James Taylor tune, and all of a sudden, I think, the writers’ room was like, ‘Oh my god, do we really have the stomach to go through with making him our arch-villain, our totally irredeemable scumbag?'” says Klemmer. “A lot of that story was heading in a certain direction, but I think, like we always do, that we respond to what we see onscreen. That kind of father-son dynamic, even the way they just kind of look so much like each other, to us, it was very poignant and forced us to rethink our big bad and our season-long like mythology, and rethink the Neron story and reconsider just how cozy Hank was with the demon threat for the back half of the season. Yeah, it’s definitely become much more complicated. That’s the direction things sort of happen on our show, but yeah, it’s a real tangled web that we have to get into for the eight episodes we have left.”

Instead of making Hank an outright villain in the back half of the season, the show will explore whether or not redemption is possible for him through his relationship with Hank.

“Hank certainly started out the season not a cold-hearted bastard but he was certainly guilty of some of the things Nate accused him of, but from this point forward we’re interested in seeing how Nate changes his father and how there’s sort of reconciliation,” says Klemmer. “There’s the literal demon on Hank’s shoulder, but we wanted to give Nate a chance to be [the angel], and we wanted to have Hank be conflicted.”

He adds, “Again, it’s weird that it was easy on paper to imagine that Hank would be a purely terrible person looking to exploit magical creatures, but inevitably you fall in love with these people on your show and you want to make apologies for the reasons they do the terrible things they do, and then ultimately, you want to at least offer them a chance at redemption, right? It’s not always possible, but I don’t know, they just always become a little bit more real.”

Image zoom Jack Rowand/The CW

Elsewhere in the episode, Constantine and Charlie had a chance to see what the Legends would look like if they never joined the team. Spoiler alert: They became quite murderous because, without Charlie, they never learned that not only fugitives were dangerous. Similar to how Zari’s experience in last season’s time loop episode helped her find her place on the team, the same can be said of Charlie after her experience with the Custodians of the Chronology and the like.

“I think her knowledge that it’s because of her that the team has any kind of humanity moving forward dealing with these creatures gives her a real sense of belonging,” says Klemmer.

DC’s Legends of Tomorrow will return to Mondays in April.

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