Madcap Legends of Tomorrow trailer reveals Disney animation episode, season 6's big bad

Can you believe it's been almost a year since we last journeyed through the timeline with the lovable screw-ups of DC's Legends of Tomorrow? To celebrate the CW superhero dramedy's long-awaited return, EW is launching Six Days of Legends. For the rest of the week leading up to the season 6 premiere on May 2, we're debuting new content tied to the show — from an exclusive new trailer, to interviews with the cast and creators, and more. Now you may be asking yourself, "Why now? Is there some major milestone coming up this season?" Well, to that we say, "Why not?"

"I've seen weird, but this is weird."

While we have no idea what elicits that reaction from Captain Sara Lance, we can say that line definitely captures the energy of this exclusive and extended trailer for season 6 of DC's Legends of Tomorrow, which EW is debuting above. Clocking in at just over two minutes, the B-movie styled promo reveals some of the madness that awaits in the CW superhero show's upcoming season, from squid-like aliens to a Disney-inspired animated episode, a singing competition show parody, and so much more.

In the new season, the Waverider crew is searching for their death-defying leader Sara Lance (Caity Lotz), who was abducted by aliens at the end of season 5. To find her, they recruit a brand new teammate, Esperanza "Spooner" Cruz (Lisseth Chavez), an alien expert/conspiracy theorist who believes she has the ability to speak with extraterrestrials. Meanwhile, Sara releases a bunch of aliens into the timeline while trying to escape and discovers who captured her and why.

"We do have a big bad who has had his sights on Sara for a long time," co-showrunner Phil Klemmer tells EW. That big bad is Raffi Barsoumian's (The Vampire Diaries) Bishop, a mad genius with a god complex who appears around 1:34 mark in the trailer. "Sara is not being targeted as a victim, but to be turned into a partner," says Klemmer. "Our big bad, at least, purports to have altruistic reasons for saving humanity. He thinks Sara is instrumental for that. Of course, his ideas are completely unhinged, but he's got a fascination with her. It's not a romantic fascination. Even if Sara is able to escape his clutches, this isn't the sort of guy that's going to give up on his plan. Even though she might escape her kidnapping, she's going to be dealing with the aftermath for the whole season."

On top of looking for Sara, the Legends will also be busy chasing after the aliens that were scattered throughout history. "We do get to blast a fair share of [aliens] and get to see what their insides look like. There's definitely more goo and gore and gross out," says Klemmer. "Oh, there are so many secretions. There's just so many weird, gross alien scenes. Just Constantine [Matt Ryan] ingesting so many disgusting concoctions, and so many people covered in slime, goo, and grossness."

Almost every season of Legends of Tomorrow has at least one big swing episode, like season 2's a time collapsing World War I adventure with J.R.R. Tolkien, season 4's Regency era-set Bollywood musical number, season 5's happy-sad jaunt through television, and, of course, Beebo. Thankfully, that remains the case in season 6. As the trailer reveals, one of the season's episodes will feature Disney-style animation and music and was directed by Lotz.

"There are some beautiful songs and Astra, played by Olivia Swann, gets to be our version of a Disney princess," says Klemmer, explaining how the episode's concept began as a joke. "The reason we did that originally is that we broke it as live-action, and then there's a point in the story where it becomes so outlandish that I was really having a difficult time seeing it in my head as live-action. I was like, 'Guys, this feels like a '90s Disney movie.' It was sort of a joke. 'What if we hired a bunch of Disney animators from the '90s who have all retired and did a '90s feature thing?'"

That's not the only wild concept episode the show has planned this season. "We have a Clue episode that's based on a one-night, ultimate Werewolf-like card game come to life. That's a big swing," says Klemmer. "We took another episode that's virtually all Constantine [Matt Ryan] in the Spanish Civil War, and that could just as well be from the Constantine TV show. We have another episode that exists in the world of a fictional sitcom starring an Alf-like alien, only in our case it's an actual alien."

But, season 6 isn't just about fun, slimy alien-hunting. "I think the notion of aliens sort of challenges you to come to terms with what it means to be an Earthling," says Klemmer. "At the risk of sounding like a tree hugger [laughs], environmentalism was really at the top of our minds as we were talking about these aliens. It was a hard year for a lot of reasons. To be attacked from without our world also forces you to reconsider why we spend so much time attacking ourselves from within as a species."

He continues: "Again, never to go to deep with it, we wanted history to not just be about hijinks and adventure. The whole premise of the show [is] "We have fix to history!" After six seasons, we really constantly have to come back to these questions like, what do you do with the part of history that was broken to begin with? What do you do with these time periods where we have this like multi-ethnic, multi-national, mixed-gender, sexuality etc bunch of superheroes arriving in these places where they're not welcomed? I'm really grateful we did aliens in retrospect."

DC's Legends of Tomorrow also stars Nick Zano, Jes Macallan, Tala Ashe, Shayan Sobhian, Dominic Purcell, and Adam Tsekhman. It returns May 2 at 8 p.m. on the CW.

(Video provided by Warner Bros. TV)

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