For the seventh year in a row, Arrow‘s penultimate episode of the season will be named after a Bruce Springsteen song — and this time, fans will likely be very curious to know exactly how the song parallels the contents of the episode. Season seven, episode 21 of Arrow will be titled “Living Proof,” named after a song on Springsteen’s “Lucky Town” album, one of two “twin” albums released together in March 1992. “Living Proof” is a dense song that covers a lot of territory, but given that Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards) is pregnant in the show, fans will likely zero in on the song’s first verse.
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It goes, “Well now, on a summer night, oh in a dusky room/Come a little piece of the Lord’s undying light/Crying like he swallowed the fiery moon/In his mother’s arms it was all the beauty I could take/Like the missing words to some prayer that I could never make/Oh, in a world so hard and dirty, so fouled and confused/Searching for a little bit of God’s mercy/I found living proof.” That verse is pretty unambiguously about the joy that the narrator (possibly Springsteen himself, given what was going on in his life at the time) felt about the birth of his child.
Since “Living Proof” will be the penultimate episode of Arrow season seven, which began with Oliver in prison, there is also this nugget of lyrics from later in the song to consider: “You shot through my anger and rage/To show me my prison was just an open cage/There were no keys, no guards/Oh, just one frightened man and some old shadows for bars.” While it would likely be a mistake to take that part too literally — after all, the prison arc has been over for some time now — the “prison” in the song was never literal, either, and certainly Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) is a character who allows himself to be caged by his own passion, anger, and myopia — something he has been trying to work on this season.
The first of the Arrow episodes to be named after a Bruce Springsteen song was arguably the most obvious (at least for a while): “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” Another song off of Darkness on the Edge of Town, “Streets of Fire” was the episode where Arrow executive producer Marc Guggenheim confirmed, yes, these are Bruce Springsteen titles. Earlier in the season, an episode titled “The Promise” could have been named after a Springsteen song, as well, although that has never been confirmed. Season three featured “This Is Your Sword,” a song from Springsteen’s then-new album High Hopes, performed with Tom Morello (who wrote the Dark Horse series Orchid and scored Iron Man) on guitar. Season four had “Lost in the Flood,” named for a song from Springsteen’s debut album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. Season five featured “Missing,” a song prominently featured in Sean Penn’s film The Crossing Guard, which starred Jack Nicholson. Penn’s previous film, The Indian Runner, was an adaptation of the Springsteen song “Highway Patrolman.” And last year’s season six had “The Ties That Bind,” from Springsteen’s 1980 album The River. A regular presence at Springsteen’s live shows, the song deals with themes of family and honor that permeated all of Arrow‘s sixth season.
The use of “Living Proof” might suggest that the episode will center on Mia (Katherine McNamara), the child of Oliver and Felicity who has taken center stage in the flash-foward storyline. Some Olicity fans might hope for a time jump that would allow the Olicity baby to be born before or during the finale which will follow “Living Proof,” although that feels unlikely given that we already saw a version of the baby’s birth in a previous episode this season.
What do you think the choice of “Living Proof” as this year’s Springsteen song could mean for the final two episodes of Arrow this season? Check in below in the comments or hit me up at @russburlingame on Twitter to talk about it!
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