The CW’s Arrow is not shy about killing off characters, though like any superhero story they sometimes come back to life. Characters such as Sara and Laurel Lance have been killed, but come back to the show thanks to the Lazarus Pit and doppelgängers from alternate Earths. According to executive producer Mark Guggenheim, there’s at least one member of Team Arrow that doesn’t have to worry about being killed permanently.
Guggenheim spoke with Entertainment Weekly and shared the two rules he put down in the Arrow writers’ room, one of which was putting the real Felicity Smoak in a superhero mask. Last night, an alternate version of Felicity donned a mask in Legends of Tomorrow as part of the show’s ‘Doomworld’ alternate reality.
“Since this is an alternate reality and we’ll probably never have the opportunity to do so again, I think it would be fun if we did Felicity as a superhero, because I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: I have zero intention of ever putting Felicity in a mask and costume on Arrow. So this is really the only circumstance by which we could do it.”
Guggenheim’s second rule is that he’ll never permanently kill of Thea Queen, sister of Green Arrow Oliver Queen.
“There’s two lines in the sand that I’ve drawn for Arrow for myself. I can’t speak for Greg [Berlanti] or for Wendy [Mericle], but for as long as I’m involved with the show, the two things I never want to do is kill off Thea [Willa Holland] and put Felicity in a mask and a costume. Those, to me, are two lines that I just think are a bridge too far. Thea, because we’ve taken so many family members away from Oliver, and Felicity because when you put a character like that in a costume, I think it diminishes who that character is and it makes the idea of superheroics seem silly.”
“If you kill off Thea, that means Oliver Queen has lost his mother, his father, and now his sister and he has no family left. Do we want to continue to tell a story where Oliver doesn’t have a family member? At some point, that may become a legitimate story choice, but her at the end of our fourth seasons, we weren’t necessarily ready to go there.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQdxa-zDKuU]
The next episode of Arrow, titled ‘Disbanded’, airs tonight on the CW at 8pm Eastern/7pm Central.
