'Legends Of Tomorrow' Producer Marc Guggenheim On A Sassy Jonah Hex And Timey Wimey Episodes [Wondercon]
Marc Guggenheim produces both Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow as part of Greg Berlanti's team of Arrowverse producers. He was at WonderCon for a Legends of Tomorrow panel with his cast, and gave roundtable interviews with the press after. Coming up on Legends, Jonah Hex gets another chance as Jonathan Schaech plays him on television.
"He's in episode 11, I can tease that," Guggenheim said. "He's terrific. Jonathan is an amazing Jonah Hex. I would say very, very faithful to the comics incarnation with a touch more sass, a little bit more attitude. That might have had something to do with the fact that I wrote episode 11 and I can't seem to write characters without sass. But he's great and watching his interactions with Rip are gold. They're just so much fun. Jonathan and Arthur [Darvill] make a great team."
Before we meet Jonah Hex, we have to get three of the Legends out of the 1950s. Rip left Ray Palmer, Sara Lance and Kendra Saunders there before the hiatus. Some of the actors were complaining about how long they wait in the '50s and Guggenheim would not exactly clear it up. We'll have to watch episode 9, which airs tonight.
"Suffice it to say, we do address those issues very head on," Guggenheim said. "I will say that it won't be an inconsequential amount of time, let's put it that way."
Looking even beyond Jonah Hex, Guggenheim teased some more heavy time travel episodes."To use the Doctor Who term, we have our most timey wimey episodes coming up," Guggenheim said. "Episode 12 in particular is a crazy timey wimey episode. It's the kind of story, quite frankly, that we couldn't tell if the raison d'etre of the show is how do we very anally retentive make sure that every rule of time travel works? Because the truth is, it's a fool's errand because anyone who has seen any time travel movie or TV show knows, it never lines up perfectly. It's just impossible. I don't care what the project is. We're trying to be responsible. At the same time, we want to tell the best story possible. You'll see by the end of the year there's a lot of things that do line up."
Delving further into time travel will also answer more questions about the Time Masters, the organization in the future who aim to keep the timeline safe. Rip is blatantly defying them.
"The back half of the season deals a lot with the Time Masters and you will get a lot of answers to your questions," Guggenheim said. "In fact, the first half of the season was sort of spent laying the foundation as far as the Time Masters are concerned, for the back half of the year. You just didn't know we were laying the pipe because we were doing it in a very slow, subtle way. By the end of the season, you'll be like, 'Oh, hat's why I met that character at that time. That's why they said this at that time.'"
Guggenheim also promised some answers about Hawkman and Hawkgirl, admitting that it is a struggle for the writers to keep track of where they've been in every century. "Is there anything that particularly vexes us?" Guggenheim said. "I would say just for me, it's probably the mythology behind the Hawks, though by the end of the season you'll get a nice definitive explanation of everything."
Legends of Tomorrow airs Thursdays at 8 PM on The CW.