Everything You Know About The Bleak Flash-Forwards on ‘Arrow’ Is About to Change

There is an entire episode of Arrow coming up, which will be set within the flash-forwards featuring Colton Haynes, Kat McNamara, and Juliana Harkavy…and that episode, combined with some revelations coming very soon, will fundamentally change the way the future of Star City has looked up until now.

Tonight’s episode will kick that off, giving fans a look at the future of The Glades. While the series began with Star City’s city limits in relative comfort and The Glades as a kind of despairing slum in need of the kind of dramatic change that a hooded vigilante could bring, it seems those roles have reversed in the flash-forwards.

“In episode 10, which is [today], wer’e going to see the Glades section of the city, which is actually a complete opposite of what we’ve seen so far in Star City,” Schwartz told ComicBook.com. “There’s actually no crime there. It’s beautiful and the sunny side of the city, which is obviously completely different from our present day, so it’s not completely bleak.”

Of the occasional criticism that the dystopian Star City of the future feels like Team Arrow failed in the present, Schwartz assured fans that it would make more sense down the line, but kept the specifics close to the vest.

“I know all the answers to why it’s that way, so, to me, I feel it makes complete sense,” she teased.

The flash-forwards in general will be more fully explored coming up. Recently, Schwartz said that the path that led to Felicity Smoak’s apparent corruption and death would be explained in a future episode, and it seems likely that will be episode 16, which takes place entirely in the future timeline.

“We’re going to parallel those worlds a lot more in the last chapter of the season,” Schwartz said, explaining that the storytelling would take a form similar to what Arrow often did with its flashbacks during the first five seasons. “The first chapter, definitely, we opened a lot of questions. There’s a lot of mystery, and then, one by one, we’re going to start to reveal all those mysteries and then we’ll have a lot more paralleling of our characters from our present day to how they became who they are in the future.”

Asked whether they would carry over some of the mysteries that the show has been laying out into season 8, though, Schwartz suggested that fans will get all the answers they need this year.

“No, we’re going to pretty much answer I think almost everything this season, and a lot of those answers are going to happen in the next few episodes,” Schwartz said. “We have an all flash-forward episode in 16 where we’re really going to dive in deep to the characters and answer mostly everything we setup in the first half.”