CWStill recovering?
The occupant of the grave teased in Arrow's season premiere was revealed last night, and it's not good news for anyone.
As Team Arrow tried to stop Star City's current biggest jerhkface, Damien Darhk (Neal McDonough), from reclaiming his magical idol and breaking out of prison, Damien grabbed one of Oliver's arrows and stabbed Laurel (Katie Cassidy) in the stomach. She seemed to recover after surgery, but only long enough to have one last moment with the rest of the team.
Then, just after she asked Oliver (Stephen Amell) for some kind of secret favor and just before her father arrived to see her, Laurel died, and Team Arrow was officially down a character who had been there since the beginning. It's not going to be easy to go on without Laurel, since, regardless of her place on the show, she also represented a major character in the comic books, and we're going to get to see exactly what this loss does to the characters and to the story moving forward.
After a press screening of the episode, stars Katie Cassidy, Paul Blackthorne, and executive producers Marc Guggenheim and Wendy Mericle explained the death and previewed what's to come. Here's everything you need to know:
1. Marc Guggenheim knew this death "would enrage a lot of people," but the decision was not made based on anything but story. "We are not immune to shipping and we're not immune to the internet controversy. We're not blind to it. We knew people would think, in the season where Oliver and Felicity get engaged and Laurel dies, that's clearly making a choice about who's going to end up with who. We told the Laurel/Oliver romance story in season one. We never really thought about going back to it. Shipping was not an element or a factor for us."
2. You haven't seen the last of Katie Cassidy in the Arrow/Flash universe: With multiple universes and time travel involved, different versions of Laurel and the Black Canary will still pop up occasionally. Katie is currently slated to play Earth-2 Laurel (and The Black Siren) in an episode of The Flash, and will play earth-1 Laurel on the CW Seed's Vixen.
3. Laurel will also appear in flashbacks in next week's episode.
4. We will find out what Laurel said to Oliver, but not until season five.
5. Sara (Caity Lotz) will find out about her sister's death on Legends of Tomorrow, with help from her father. Paul Blackthorne will be appearing on Legends to grieve with her. "I think we give it its due," Guggenheim says of the episode.
6. Quentin has now been through the death of a daughter three times, and it's not getting any easier, according to Paul Blackthorne. "This death is just devastating for Lance because this is not the one that was ever supposed to happen. He's going to have to pick up the pieces, not pick up a bottle, and reconcile what's left in his life. With that, he's got the Arrow family, and that'll be where he'll have to find his anchor now, from here on in, without his beautiful daughter."
7. Katie Cassidy is supportive of the direction the show is going in. "Since season two up until now, Laurel has had a truly amazing journey and they've written so well for me," she said. "I've had such an incredible arc so it made sense to me, creatively, that we've told Laurel's story. It has come to an end in the Arrow-verse. I think the shock value is good. It's such a jolt and such a turn in the story that it gives them so much more to do and places to go. Otherwise I feel like shows can get stale."
8. Wendy Mericle described the upcoming episodes as "devastating." Laurel's death will be felt throughout the rest of season four and into season five.
9. "Secrets, guilt, death—that's our secret formula." Oliver may not feel as responsible as he once would have for a death like this, but Diggle is certainly feeling the guilt after he was so unwilling to believe his brother might not be totally reformed. "He'll never forgive himself," Guggenheim says. "The biggest consequences emotionally are felt by Thea and by Diggle. I mean Diggle, you can draw a straight-ish line from his decisions in this episode to Laurel's death. That's a fact that's not lost on him."
10. Whether the Black Canary mantle will be passed on has not been discussed, but her legacy will be covered in the next episode.
11. Laurel's death will have a "huge impact" on Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards). "If you think about Felicity and what she would do in the wake of something like this, I leave you to draw your own conclusions," Mericle said.
12. Cassidy's final scene that she shot was a reshoot of her the stabbing scene, but she views a different scene as her real last one: "That [last] scene [in the hospital] was so real shooting it because it was my saying goodbye to the team and all of us," Cassidy said. "It definitely wasn't difficult for me to get to that emotional point. It was hard but it was very real. It was genuine. There was no other way that I would want it to go."
Arrow airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on the CW.