Arrow Season 2.5 Reveal: Felicity Works For Kord Industries

In the latest issue of Arrow Season 2.5, released today, former Queen Consolidated employee and current Green Arrow computer guru Felicity Smoak revealed that she's been working for Kord Industries.

I mean, she revealed it to the audience, not so much to the other characters, who didn't seem particularly surprised and so have almost certainly known for a while.

A recent trailer indicated that she would be working at Tech Village, which looked like a big box retail store where she was working in the computer department...but here, she just says "Kord." Whether that means she'll be fired from Kord by the end of Season 2.5 and get a new job, or that Kord owns Tech Village isn't clear. There's no analogous business in the comics that might give us a hint.

Between seasons, it was revealed that Ray Palmer will own his own tech company and be a major player in the upcoming season of Arrow. The showrunners admitted at Comic Con International: San Diego this summer that they had originally planned to use Ted Kord, but that there were other plans for the would-be Blue Beetle at the Warner Bros. level and DC Entertainment had told them they couldn't use him for the storyline. There has been some speculation, since the Kord Industries name and logo is already established in the Arrowverse and its headquarters appeared in a recent promotional poster for The Flash, that Ted could be appearing on The Flash.

Ted Kord was killed in 2005 and replaced as Blue Beetle, and while he made occasional time-travel appearances and other oddball cameos after that, he never returned from the dead. With the New 52 relaunch, Ted is alive, but is not and has never been the Blue Beetle. Nevertheless, Beetle and Booster Gold --or, a version of them from an alternate earth on which Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis's Justice League International happened -- will soon be appearing in Justice League 3000.

Arrow returns on October 8 -- the same day this issue of Arrow Season 2.5 will be available in print at comic book specialty stores. The first two issues of the series are already availabl on comiXology and the DC Comics, Amazon and Barnes & Noble websites in digital form.