A FINAL FADEOUT
‘Legacies’ ends its four-season: here’s what happened in the last episode
AFTER four seasons, the Salvatore School closed its doors on The CW with the series finale of “Legacies.” The episode, “Just Don’t Be A Stranger, Okay?” -- cowritten by showrunner Brett Matthews and “The Vampire Diaries” co-creator Julie Pec — aired Thursday night and holds the distinction of ending the supernatural franchise.
“Legacies” ends well for most of its characters — but after vanquishing a vengeful god in the previous episode, the students are left to pick up the pieces and figure out what’s next. Along the way, they’re helped by two guest stars from the franchise’s past: Joseph Morgan as Klaus Mikaelson, the father of Hope Mikaelson (Danielle Rose Russell), who takes a break from his own personal heaven to tell his kid he’s proud of her; and Candice King as Caroline Forbes, who ends the episode taking over the Salvatore School from departing headmaster Alaric Saltzman (Matt Davis).
And not only that, pretty much everyone ends up with who you would expect. Lizzie (Jenny Boyd) and MG (Quincy Fouse) finally kiss after four seasons of back and forth, and decide to date. Kaleb (Chris Lee) and Cleo (Omono Okojie) also end up together, with the latter getting an interesting tease that she may some day end up running the school. Jed (Ben Levin), now cured of his werewolf curse, has ceded his wolf pack to Finch (Courtney Bandeko) and is happily reading with Ben (Zane Phillips), who has lost a curse of his own when we last see them.
The biggest plotlines, though, are saved for Hope and Landon (Aria Shahghasemi). After saving everyone’s lives last episode, Landon is dealing with the fact that he’s lost a large part of his emotions as a consequence — so much so that he knows he loves Hope, but can’t actually feel it. Still, he does manage to snag that message from Klaus for her, and though he ends up in the afterlife ferrying lost souls, it’s what Hope needs to move forward.
Brett Matthews answered some questions about the “Legacies” finale.
Any chance the series could come back in some form?
That’s a question for executives more than for myself. The problem you generally run into is that the cast starts taking other jobs and it becomes impossible at a certain point. So if there were anything to happen on that front, it would have to happen quickly.
Why did you decide to bring back Joseph Morgan and Candice King ?
We would have loved to have everybody back ... But obviously our budget is always something we are banging our heads against. Joe and Candice certainly seemed like the two most pivotal [characters]. And it felt emotionally right! Those characters are the legacies of the characters in our shows, so we’re very glad that worked out. If this had to end, we sort of knew that was the thing that had to happen.
What led to ending with the happy couples in the finale?
When we were looking at the conclusion of the story we had told for four seasons, these were the pairings that felt right to the room. Given a longer timeline, who knows? This is a world where the show was coming to an end. It was trying to find what felt like closure in as much as we could provide it, rather than just dropping some wild new direction at the very end that we would then not have the chance to explore. “Legacies” has always tried to be this relentlessly optimistic voice, sometimes to people’s frustrations. It definitely felt ... it was important for us to see as many of those characters as we could be happy in the end.