So long, Captain Cold (Wentworth Miller): Heatwave (Dominic Purcell) has a new superhero/villain partner on Legends of Tomorrow and his name is Ray Palmer (Brandon Routh)!
After he was forced to destroy his ATOM suit lest it fall into the hands of a brutal warlord in the past, Ray was feeling a bit down about his place on the team aboard the Waverider. Thankfully, Mick Rory was feeling the weird unlikely friendship forming between him and Ray, so he approached him in the final scene of last week’s episode to formerly extend an olive branch in the form of Snart’s old cold gun.
What is this new duo of Rory and Ray going to bring to the show (which just got an additional four episode order for season two)?
“Comedy … hopefully,” Routh tells Nerdist with a laugh on set in Vancouver. “The Rory and Ray stuff isn’t as heavy in [the last episode] but Ray impresses himself or pushes himself on Mick a little bit. Even though they are very opposite, there is some kinship that has developed because of their opposing natures. Mick begrudgingly puts up with Ray and kind of understands Ray’s depression and big shift that he’s going through after having lost his suit in such dramatic fashion.”
If you’re into this new team-up as much as we are, then we’ve got some good news for you: it’s not going away anytime soon.
“It continues for several episode,s and Ray will come to really gain a lot of insight himself through the relationship with Mick,” Routh says. “It’s a good partnership. The Rory and Mick relationship is fun to see play out in the next couple of episodes.”
But the real question is: will Ray pick up Snart’s cold gun and actually use it? Or will he figure out a new heroic alter ego for himself?
“That may come to pass,” Routh teases with a smile. “That’s fun.”
In this week’s episode, “Compromised,” viewers will also get to meet an older version of one of the Justice Society of America members seen earlier in season two: Obsidian (Lance Henriksen).
“We go back to 1987 and will meet a much older version of Obsidian, who is played by Lance Henriksen,” executive producer Marc Guggenheim says. “That’s one way [the JSA will continue to be a part of season two]. We have another device up our sleeve that I don’t want to spoil because it deals with stuff that is mythology based in the back-half of the year.”
Now that Sara (Caity Lotz) has taken on a leadership role aboard the Waverider in Rip Hunter’s (Arthur Darvill) absence, expect her new responsibilities to help her grow even more as a character.
“Sometimes with stories for the season, sometimes they work out better than you ever expected and sometimes they’re worse than you expected,” Guggenheim says. “I’ve got to give a lot of props to Caity Lotz. As you see her become more comfortable with being the leader of this ragtag group, it’s so fun to watch her. The character is embodying the role of a leader and Caity’s performance really embraces it. It turned out to be one of the most successful things we’ve done in season two.”
But that doesn’t mean that the Legends team has given up on trying to find their former leader after he saved all their lives in the season two premiere.
“That’s going to be something that is always going on in the background, and in some cases the foreground, in the various episodes,” Guggenheim says. “We don’t want to change the mission statement from fixing aberrations to going to save Rip, because the bat’s been taken out of their hand because they don’t know how to find him. Even if they were to say priority number one was finding Rip, I don’t know how they’d go about it given the nature of his disappearance.”
But “you will find out before the Legends do” about what happened to Rip, Guggenheim promises.
What are you most excited to see from this week’s episode of Legends? Tweet me your thoughts at @SydneyBucksbaum!
Legends of Tomorrow airs Thursdays at 8 p.m. on The CW.
Images: The CW
