CWCaution! Arrow spoilers ahead!
Game changed, right Arrow fans?
The Black Canary just put on her mask for the last time and paid the ultimate price for it, all thanks to Damien Darhk's (Neal McDonough) continued determination to be the absolute worst.
It turns out that Laurel Lance (Katie Cassidy) was the one in the grave that ended the season four premiere. She was stabbed by Damien himself, who wanted payback for Quentin Lance's betrayal. Thanks to Diggle's brother, Andy, Team Arrow ended up right where Damien needed them to be, and Damien stuck one of Oliver's arrows right into Laurel's gut.
Laurel, who had only just decided to accept a promotion to District Attorney (which would have placed her right in new mayor Ruve Adams' inner circle), was rushed to the hospital, and at first everything seemed fine. Then, during a heartbreaking conversation with Oliver, she started convulsing, and she was declared dead just before midnight.
Laurel's demise marks the first death of a major character who's been there since the beginning, and it comes after months of speculating as to who Oliver was crying over in the season premiere. Theories were all over the internet, and the impending death has loomed over the entire season.
"We started off the year with the promise of a death, and when we sort of worked our way through our various different creative choices, we realized the thing that would give us the most pop [creatively] going into the end of the season and into next season unfortunately would be Laurel," executive producer Marc Guggenheim told reporters at a screening of tonight's episode.
After the screening, we got on the phone with Guggenheim to find out exactly what it takes for a show to kill off one of its original characters.
E! News: I'd really like to just talk about the process of killing a major character. What is required to make a move like that?
Guggenheim: It requires a lot of fortitude. We've killed off a lot of characters on the show before, but I don't think we've ever killed off a character with this kind of profile and importance to the show and it's a very gutsy move. I don't say that as a way of sort of patting ourselves on the back, but it's a risk we felt was important to take in light of the fact that we're going into our fifth season. We've always said that Arrow is a show that has to evolve or die. As much as we would love to play it safe, I think the show benefits from these occasional really throwing a hard six. It's produced some of our best episodes of the show, so there's that.
The other thing I think it requires is it requires a really amazing cast, because if it was just Katie Cassidy and a whole bunch of other actors that no one wanted to watch and we didn't feel like they could sustain a show, then this would go from risky to just plain old stupid.
When and how did you decide you needed to kill someone off the show?
Basically we began the season with a grave and a tombstone and we knew that we want to open the season with something that would make you lean forward and pull you through the season. We had never done a flash forward on the show before, and it was just a notion that Greg Berlanti, Wendy Mericle, and myself were really intrigued by. We sort of did it in part because we knew, while we didn't know who was in the grave initially, we knew that someone would probably die on the show, because that's basically been our modus operandi going forward.
Generally speaking, we've killed off a character once a year, so we didn't think we were doing anything unexpected when we said we're going to be killing off a character this year. I think the thing that was different was when we ultimately came to the conclusion that it be Laurel, someone who's sort of a charter member of our cast, we were doing something that was extra bold. It was a death that had greater ramifications for the show than any deaths we had done on the show previously.
At what point in the season did you decide that it was Laurel?
I think it was around the time when we were in production on episode 16. Honestly, we pushed the decision off as late as we possibly could.
What is that like for the production when you know someone's leaving?
I think it's always difficult. When we've killed off characters in the past, we always start with having a conversation with the actor playing that character. We always ask the actor, how do you want us to message this to the crew and the rest of the cast? Everyone in the cast and crew has always been, for four years now, incredibly respectful, in part because they're great people, and in part because death on the show is sort of the unspoken cast member.
Was it different this time since everyone knew from the beginning of the season that someone was dying, but they didn't know who?
You know, that's funny. I think originally we thought it wouldn't be different, because again, we've killed off characters in all three seasons, so season four we didn't think would be all that different, but yeah, I think things were a little different. The fact that we'd sort of codified the reality that we always kill off a character each year, I think that had an interesting effect on the audience, it had an interesting effect on the cast. That was not intentional, but it had an unintended effect.
Have you noticed a big difference in audience reception with the death teased so far ahead of time, vs. when you've kept it a surprise?
It's a good question. We mixed episode 18 [Monday] and I was watching it for the first time with an eye for the promo that we released, which basically said someone's going to die in this episode. I think once you sort of say that, it's less surprising. The one thing we've discovered over the history of the show is there's different types of audience.
There's the audience that reads everything on twitter, reads everything online and sees every promo and sees the show one way, and then there's a lot of audience members who don't pay attention to any of that stuff and experience the show a different way and you try to write and produce the show for both sets of audiences, but at the end of the day, different types of audiences are going to have different types of experience.
People are definitely going to see something fishy in the fact that Laurel was supposed to be OK, then asked Oliver for a favor, and then was suddenly dying. Are we really not supposed to read into that?
I think that that's fine, I think that that's fair game. I'm very much the believer that the best version of television is kind of interactive. I'm of the school of thought that I want the audience to engage and ask questions and see things differently than we as writers intended to play things, or even differently from the way the actors intended to play things. That to me makes for a more vital viewing experience, the idea that people aren't just interpreting moments and scenes and stories the way we intended but are bringing their own set of interpretations to things. So when it won't spoil something, I'll always be honest about our intentions.
In this case, our intention was not to imply that Oliver had something to do with Laurel's death, but I love the idea that people will push against that and question it and reexamine it. I'm all for it. I think to me there's actually no higher compliment that an audience can pay a show than watch with that level of engagement. I would much rather have a small number of very active viewers than a huge number of inactive viewers.
Stay tuned for more from the screening Q&A after the west coast airing!
Arrow airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on the CW.