Arrow Showrunner Reveals Major Season 5 Finale Plot Point

12/06/2016 10:08 am EST

Arrow showrunner Marc Guggenheim has revealed a significant moment that will occur during the show's fifth season finale, one that has ties all the way back to the series' beginning and very conception.

SPOILER WARNING FOR THE ARROW SEASON 5 FINALE

Flashbacks telling the tale of Oliver Queen's five-year journey to becoming the avenging vigilante of Starling City have been a central part of the series narrative structure from the very beginning. That structure was actually supposed to be a part of the show's ending as well, at least as it was originally conceived.

"Ideally by the last episode of the series, the very last flashback will be Oliver seeing the boat that rescued him in the pilot," producer Andrew Kreisberg said during the 2012 summer TCA press tour, Arrow's first ever TCA event. The idea would have brought the Arrow story full circle and given it a real sense of closure.

But things have changed. Arrow has been hugely successful and spawn an entire shared multiverse of DC Comics television series. The flashbacks have nearly run their course, but there is apparently no end to Arrow in sight.

That's mean we're still going to get that return to the pilot episode's flashback, it just isn't going to mark the end of the series.

"Spoiler alert. That's going to end up being the Season 5 finale," Arrow showrunner Marc Guggenheim told TVLine. It is worth noting that Arrow has not yet been officially renewed for a sixth season, but most consider the renewal to be inevitable. "It was really just a hope at that point [in 2012] that the show would run five years, and we always thought that we would intercut the final moment of the series with the first moment of the series, that it would form one big Moebius strip.

"There's still a part of me that wishes we could do that," he continued. "But I wouldn't want to artificially extend the flashbacks [beyond five seasons], and I also wouldn't want to artificially cut the show short. It would've been a beautifully elegant thing, and Five Years Ago Me would've loved it. But things change, and I do think it'll make the Season 5 finale pretty awesome."

Despite this reveal, Guggenheim says there's still plenty of room for surprises in the Arrow Season 5 finale. "Look, we have some incredibly clear plans for what we want to do in the Season 5 finale," Guggenheim said. "At the same time, we always leave ourselves room to be like, '…and throw this cliffhanger in, throw that twist in.' Usually, the craziest ideas on this show tend to be the ones that the ideas sort of linger, and we never really quite set on them. Like, 'Oh, maybe we'll kill off Tommy?' We don't fully commit until we're pretty much breaking the episode."

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Arrow airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET on The CW.

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