Arrow‘s seventh season has officially come to a close, and it looks like it dropped a pretty massive bombshell in the process.
Major spoilers for Arrow‘s season seven finale, “You Have Saved This City”, below! Only look if you want to know!
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The episode saw Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) and Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards) going into hiding after defeating the Ninth Circle. Quite a bit of time passed, and their daughter Mia was born, only for their new bit of domesticity to be shattered by the arrival of The Monitor (LaMonica Garrett).
As The Monitor explained, he was coming to collect on Oliver’s deal that he made during “Elseworlds”, where he bargained for the lives of Barry Allen and Kara Danvers. The Monitor revealed that in order to keep the universe at balance, Oliver would die in the coming “Crisis” — but that he needed to help try to help prevent more bloodshed in the event.
This confirmed a theory that fans have had almost since “Elseworlds” began — that Oliver wouldn’t make it out of next year’s “Crisis on Infinite Earths” alive. The possibility of this has been hinted at quite a lot in the months since, with The CW president Mark Pedowitz confirming that a major character was “highly likely” to die in the event.
The notion that Oliver’s death is already this set in stone casts a particularly interesting shadow over the show’s eighth and final season, and also adds some pretty major stakes to “Crisis” months before the event even begins.
“You think of the scale of it, and what this character means, and him being introduced into the DC TV world, the first person when you think when you think Monitor is you think Anti-Monitor,” Garrett admitted to ComicBook.com before “Elseworlds”. “So, the scale — where’s this going? And then when you think Anti-Monitor, the next thing you think of is “Crisis on Infinite Earths”. So if you keep doing that to yourself, it makes it too much on your shoulders when you are going into it. You have to think about it later. To me, I’m a former athlete. When you think about the big games, the bowl games, you think about the Super Bowl, you think about the World Series, and you ask those players, ‘what does this mean? This is a huge game, this is the biggest game ever.’ And they downplay it. They don’t want to think of it. After the game, they’ll tell you how much pressure they were under, and how much stress. They couldn’t sleep at night. So leading up to it, it’s like they’re trying not to think about that, because if you make that moment bigger than what it is, it’s gonna get the best of you.”
“I immediately, Anti-Monitor, Psycho-Pirate, Pariah, you just start thinking of all these names…so that’s when I went and looked, and saw who is already in place, and who they would have to introduce to bring on the big picture,” Garrett added. “And that was fun part for me too, ’cause you know, as a fan, as a comic book fan, that’s where I would hope it would go to.”
Arrow will return for an eighth and final season this fall on The CW.
