Though Arrow wrapped up back in January, the pain of the show coming to an end after eight seasons is still raw for fans. And star Stephen Amell decided to get us all crying again by sharing this behind-the-scenes video on his Instagram account, which captures the moment he officially finished playing the Green Arrow.
In season 8’s finale, “Fadeout,” the show concluded on a bittersweet note, as Oliver Queen and his wife Felicity Smoak reunited in the afterlife. You can see the aftermath of completion on that sequence in the video below. Both Amell and Emily Bett Rickards are clearly getting emotional – with their on-screen daughter Katherine McNamara on hand to comfort Rickards.
“To our number one, our leading man, who’s led us through eight seasons,” says a crew member off-screen. “Thank you. That’s a golden wrap on Stephen Amell.” The gathered cast and crew then erupts in applause.
With Oliver sacrificing himself in “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” the Arrow finale was built around his family and friends coming together for his funeral, with the episode exploring the hero’s incredibly legacy. Hopefully, that legacy will get the chance to continue in the Arrowverse as well. After all, the show’s penultimate episode was a backdoor pilot for proposed spinoff Green Arrow and the Canaries, following McNamara’s Mia Queen taking on her father’s mantle in a future Star City.
We’ve yet to find out whether the show has been picked up or not, but the episode itself scored high ratings, which is encouraging. If this is it for the Green Arrow corner of the franchise, though, that would certainly be a bummer, but at least we got eight seasons of Arrow, which spawned a whole TV universe, in the first place. So, thank you to Stephen Amell and the team for that.