Since Arrow debuted back in 2012, flashbacks have played a crucial part in the series’ narrative. Aside from occasionally shedding some light on the pasts of various supporting characters, they normally tend to explore what happened during the five years Oliver Queen was away from Star City. Although primarily set on the hellish island of Lian Yu, they’ve also taken us to places such as Hong Kong and Russia, effectively showing us how the Green Arrow came to be.
Seeing as how season 5 is set to wrap in about three months, the obvious question is presented: What happens now that we’ve learned Ollie’s complete backstory?
One solution would be to have the narrative take place almost entirely in the present and focus on the task at hand, just as Arrow’s brethren The Flash and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow (mostly) do each week. Another would be to utilize flash forwards, thereby having Oliver’s actions in the present affecting something or someone in the future like, say, Connor Hawke, who made an appearance in the unforgettable “Star City 2046” episode of Legends. To be honest, this is a notion I’ve been championing for some time.
Interestingly enough, series lead Stephen Amell has been having similar thoughts, which he shared in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly:
“I am open and excited about any possible idea, whether that’s a simple flash-forward narrative that we carry through the season, which I think we did to varying degrees of success in season 4. If that means that simply the flashbacks do not exist anymore and it allows us to expand the universe in terms of focusing more on other people’s backstories, not even necessarily flashbacks of people’s home life, just their life outside of the Arrow cave, I think that’s interesting.
We can do that because, quite simply, we have more time, we have more pages, we have more chance for dialogue. I know they’re kicking around some ideas, but truthfully I have no earthly idea if there is any sort of element that we will be bringing into season 6 or if we just simply acknowledge that we pitched the show as a five-year origin story and we got to do it, which I think in and of itself is an accomplishment. There’s not a ton left on television from new shows from 2012. Just the fact that we made it that far is worth patting ourselves on the back for, ever so briefly.”
Although not having any sort of cutaway wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, after five years, it’s something I’ve grown accustomed to. It would just feel like something’s missing, as if you didn’t have any jalapenos on your Angry Whopper.
Continuing on, Amell had this to say:
“Yeah. I think that the key to a story like that is that — look, Green Arrow was obviously pitched as a five-year origin story, but we’re breaking the flashback story as we go along. There’s always an overarching plan, but it generally has to go season to season. Like, I don’t think we knew at the beginning of the season that at the end of season 2, Oliver would end up in Hong Kong. We don’t necessarily know that stuff, and that’s just the nature of episodic television in 23 episodes a year.
I think that the critical element, if we ever did something like a flash-forward, would be to make sure that we understood the precise beginning point and end point of that story and all the things that went into it, because I think that if we try to piecemeal it together, especially because it’s a flash-forward, that it just wouldn’t work. You know what I mean? We’d have to know the end game if we did something like that. I mean look, I’ve always had a very specific idea for how the series would end. It came to me at some point during season 1, and whether it’s through a flash-forward or whatever, I just hope that we end up getting to do that.”
Arrow airs on Wednesday nights on The CW.
