'Arrow' Will Address Felicity's Supposed Future Death in Upcoming Episode

Arrow fans were dealt a shocking blow earlier this season when a flash forward to a grim future Star City in The CW series revealed that Felicity was dead. Since then, few details have been given about this sad event, but fans won't be left hanging for too much longer.

In a recent interview with TV Guide, Arrow showrunner Beth Schwartz explained that the puzzle of Felicity's apparent death is one that will start coming together in the next few episodes.

"We're going to l earn a lot about it in the next couple of episodes, but definitely [Episode] 16 is going to be the answer to that mystery and what's been going on in the Glades," Schwartz explained. "In [Episode] 10, actually, we see the Glades for the first time, and we meet Rene (Rick Gonzalez) in the future, which is exciting. We get to see, as terrible as Star City is, the Glades is a booming city, and that's the happy place of the future. And Rene has a lot to do with that. So we'll see that in 10 and then, yeah, the next couple episodes will start answering a lot of these questions."

As fans may recall, in this season's fourth episode "Level Two", William Clayton (Ben Lewis) and Roy Harper (Colton Haynes) traveled to Star City following a mysterious message from Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards) where they ultimately encountered Dinah Drake (Juliana Harkavy) and Zoe Ramirez (Andrea Sixtos). It's Dinah that reveals to the men that the message they've been following could not have come from Felicity because she's dead. It is revealed a few episodes later in "Due Process" that Felicity's death wasn't a tragic accident or an illness, either. Felicity had instead gone down a darker path, taking up her father's codename of "The Calculator" and was murdered after getting too deep in with criminals.

The idea of Felicity going down a darker path is something that the series somewhat illustrated in the present day of this season. Desperate to stop Ricardo Diaz (Kirk Acevedo) Felicity is shown going to new extremes -- including getting a gun from Anatoly Knyazev (David Nykl) with the intent to kill Diaz. However, some fans have suspected that Felicity's dark turn was part of her going undercover, in a sense, and that perhaps her death may not be real. After all, Roy was "killed" so that everyone would think he was dead while he was, in fact, alive and starting a new life. While Schwartz would neither confirm nor deny that as a possibility, she did promise that there is "a lot more" to Felicity's death.

"Well, I definitely can't say yes or no to that, but there's definitely a lot more to that mystery that will unravel in the next few episodes, especially in 16."

Are you excited to find out the truth behind Felicity's apparently grim fate? Let us know in the comments below.

Arrow airs Monday nights at 8 p.m. ET, before episodes of Black Lightning on The CW.