Being someone who was highly critical of Legends of Tomorrow‘s first two seasons, I’m never shy to admit how greatly I’ve taken to its third. Hey, sometimes it takes certain TV series a bit of time to truly hit their stride, and I believe that’s something this particular show has done since last fall.
So, now that Matt Ryan’s John Constantine has been promoted to series regular for the fourth season, we expect for next year to be even better. And with greater inclusion of said demonologist should come more supernatural threats because, quite frankly, why have that guy around on a more permanent basis if you intend on pitting him against corrupt men of history or run-of-the-mill supervillains?
Based on what executive producer and showrunner Phil Klemmer had to say in a recent discussion with TV Line, season 3’s big bad in Mallus will be but the vanguard of otherworldly baddies to come:
“He 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.”
If indeed he’s implying that monsters populated the Earth before humanity inherited it, that makes one wonder if the producers used Clive Barker’s Cabal as an influence, a literary work that was adapted to film in the form of Nightbreed and later served as inspiration for Cradle of Filth’s Midian album.
But, as Klemmer continued, it became apparent that his colleague in Marc Guggenheim isn’t the only one in the writers room who loves political allegory:
“We want to get into the world of fantastic myths and monsters a bit more. It’s kind of presumptuous for anybody to think they have ownership of this Earth or any part of it. Not to get deep into immigration metaphors, but Mallus is an ancient evil, he doesn’t understand humans and doesn’t understand why we have any claim to controlling this world of ours.”
To see where the saga heads next, be sure to catch Legends of Tomorrow‘s season finale tonight on The CW.
