Arrow EP Teases If the Final Season Will Travel to Other Earths

Arrow‘s final season is off and running with a season premiere that has the Internet still buzzing a day later. The first surprise of the Episode centered on an Easter Egg for fans, but quickly shifted to the fact that a large chunk of the action occurred on Earth-2. Naturally, fans were itching to know if Arrow would spend a lot of time hopping to different Earths over the course of this final season. TVLine sat down with Beth Schwartz, the showrunner, and talked about some of the bombshell moments from the season’s first episode. There’s still plenty to talk about besides the idea of a bunch of parallel universes coming into focus so soon in the last season.

Crisis on Infinite Earths was certainly dancing in everyone’s minds heading into the final season of Arrow, and the show was all too willing to show off the balancing act between the show that started it all and this latest conflict. Starling City is a throwback to the Pilot and Season 1 of the show in very overt ways. This is a ton of fun to see on screen, the scenes carried a ton of emotional weight as characters we haven’t seen in awhile walk in the frame to greet Oliver Queen. Earth-2 is a great conceit to explore what things could have been like if some of the choices from earlier in the series were turned on their ear. But, Schwartz was quick to let people know that this won’t just be one long road trip through the multiverse.

“We visit places that we’ve gone to in our previous seasons… different locations,” She offered. “I think we only have, like, two episodes actually in Star City” — though, barring the “Crisis” crossover, the premiere is the only episode to have scenes on an alternate Earth.

Things didn’t go so great for Oliver on The Monitor’s first mission. Those dwarf star particles come at a terrible price for anyone who loved Earth-2 in the Arrowverse. That’s right everyone is gone at the moment. No Harrison “Harry” Wells and Jessie Quick, nothing. The hero had to see his mother and loved ones perish in agonizing detail. That red and white lightning is a dead giveaway for anyone that has been familiar with DC’s assorted crises before. As soon as the word “attack” was used, you could tell something was up.

The stakes are painfully clear after watching the Crisis claim this planet so violently at the end of the episode. Oliver is going to need some help to contain this one if they’re going to have any hope of saving the multiverse from this scourge.