During its first five seasons, something you’d expect to see in each and every premiere of Arrow was that of the first of many flashbacks to come. Basically, we’d learn more about what happened to Oliver Queen while he was missing for the five years that preceded his emergence as a vigilante in his home city.
Now, we won’t deny that this method of storytelling wasn’t always met with the greatest of fan reactions. Sure, they did provide for some compelling television – more specifically in seasons 1, 2 and 5 – but the fact of the matter is that the producers painted themselves into a corner by going in this route in the first place. Thus, if they just abandoned the origin story without completing it, we’d all feel shortchanged, like it or not.
But now that those five years are behind us, the cast and crew seem ready to move on. In fact, we learned that flashbacks in that sense are over with, but some will be utilized if a certain character’s backstory needs to be fleshed out in a given episode.
When recently speaking at Heroes and Villains Fan Fest in Nashville, Stephen Amell said that we’ll see some flashbacks when things kickoff this fall, just not in the way we’ve grown accustomed to:
“There are flashbacks in the first episode that take us back to the immediate aftermath of the events in the finale. Which is one of the reasons that I had to shave my beard, so I could match up with [the finale].”
Actually, this kind of reminds me of how The Flash’s season 2 premiere was structured, so we may just see a slight time jump when Arrow returns on Thursday, October 12 on The CW.
