Ever since Oliver Queen left the island (and went back to it for some reason), Arrow has been struggling when it comes to making those flashbacks compelling. Thankfully, they’re coming to an end during the show’s fifth season, and while it’s thought we’ll still get the occasional look into the hero’s past, the story of his journey from playboy to vigilante is close to wrapping up.
Just how much will that change Arrow? Well, according to executive producer Wendy Mericle, the end of that five year story is going to drastically alter The CW series.
“What’s interesting about Season 5, just having been there from the beginning and knowing Marc [Guggenheim] and Andrew [Kreisberg] and Greg [Berlanti] as well as I do, the show was conceived in many ways as a five-year thing. Those flashbacks will be gone after this season. I think it is going to be a different… not a different show, but it is going to have to be reinvented in Season Six, because we’re closing a chapter for sure.”
Reinventing Arrow wouldn’t be a bad move, and with a new vigilante team coming to the series this year, an effort to do so is already underway. Still, it will definitely be interesting to see how the show changes when a good five to ten minutes of each episode aren’t devoted to flashbacks which stopped serving the story back in season 2 after Deathstroke’s arc wrapped up.
Season six of Arrow is still a long way off, and with only one instalment of season five on the air at this point, it feels like it’s a little too soon to be worrying about what the show will look like this time next year. It’s good that those working on the series are already looking ahead to the future of course, but here’s hoping they get this season right before delving into the next.
