Arrow Season Two: Penultimate Episode (Again) Named After a Bruce Springsteen Song

Executive Producer Marc Guggenheim announced the title and creative team behind the upcoming twenty-second episode of the show's second season, "Streets of Fire." This marks the second year in a row that the show's penultimate episode has been named after a Bruce Springsteen song -- specifically, songs from the same album. Last year, the penultimate episode of Arrow's first season was titled "Darkness on the Edge of Town," the title track of Springsteen's 1978 follow-up to Born to Run. "Streets of Fire" first appeared on that same album.

It's not clear whether this season's fifteenth episode, titled "The Promise," was an intentional reference to an outtake from Darkness on the Edge of Town. While Guggenheim's tweet is the first time we've seen the Springsteen connection officially acknowledged, we pointed it out shortly before "The Promise" aired. In 1984, The Warriors and Bullet to the Head director Walter Hill co-wrote and directed a film titled "Streets of Fire," named after the Springsteen song. Prior to Arrow using "Darkness on the Edge of Town," it was appropriated as the title of a zombie novel by occasional comic book writer Brian Keene (Keene also wrote a novel titled The Rising, which is another Bruce Springsteen album, but that was a coincidence). Whether the title will be literal -- as in, whether there will be a fire, or a villain sporting a flame motif or fire-based powers -- we won't know until the synopsis for the episode drops. It's entirely possible that, like "Darkness on the Edge of Town," the title is mostly or entirely metaphorical. "For what it's worth I voted for 'Dancing In The Dark,'" [a 1984 single by Springsteen, and the artist's biggest hit on the Billboard singles chart]  joked co-writer Ben Sokolowski on Twitter. None of the same writers or director worked on both of the Springsteen-titled episodes.

Arrow Ep. 222. Co-written by @BenSokolowski Keeping with tradition penultimate ep named after @brucespringsten song: pic.twitter.com/6rZWzrhQeA — Marc Guggenheim (@mguggenheim) March 28, 2014