Arrow Showrunners On Why They Wanted To Do A Gun Violence Episode

02/13/2017 06:19 pm EST

With a presentation on DC All Access earlier today, the cat is well and truly out of the bag that this week's episode of Arrow -- which details the backstory of Wild Dog and puts Mayor Oliver Queen at the center of a crisis -- is what used to be called a "Very Special Episode."

The topic is gun violence, and while Arrow is unlikely to make a definitive declaration of which "side" most of the characters are on, it likely shouldn't be a surprise that character like Green Arrow, who has historically tackled political issues, should do so on TV as well.

Last season, Arrow executive producer Marc Guggenheim suggested that the political environment in the United States was too polarized to make Oliver Queen the mayor of a major city without inadvertently offending someone. This season, he's actually become the mayor -- but for the most part his responsibilities have been delegated to his sister Thea or his friend and deputy mayor Quentin Lance, who took care of their city business largely off-camera.

This week, Oliver will have to perform for the audience at home as well as the people of Star City -- and he won't have a mask to hide behind when he does.

"Well, we went into season 5 wanting to do an episode about an issue," Guggenheim said during a screening of the episode earlier today. "I'm old, so what does this mean? It means that I grew up on St. Elsewhere and Picket Fences and LA Law. I grew up in a time where it was commonplace, like literally every week, for a one-hour drama to tackle the issues of the day. Somewhere along the line we got away from that -- like, the whole industry got away from that. And now you've got like Blackish and Carmichael Show, but as far as network dramas are concerned? Really not tackling current events, current issues. So we went into season 5 with the desire to. It's the fifth season; we've hopefully earned the freedom to, in 23 episodes of television, you can have 22 episodes of candy and one episode of vegetables. We sort of felt that gun violence felt like the right topic, because of its topicality but also because of the level of gun violence that's on Arrow. We could have done an episode on abortion, but that's not really where the show lives, so gun violence sort of felt like the right thing to tackle."

The issue isn't just in the air -- it's been one that DC has already recently explored, albeit not on TV. Writer Christopher Priest and artists Denys Cowan and Bill Sienkiewicz recently discussed it in Deathstroke. And as in the case of this week's Arrow, that issue largely centered on characters in their street clothes rather than in costume.

"It was an opportunity, too, to do an episode where he's in the Green Arrow costume," explained Wendy Mericle. It was an episode, from a story perspective, it was really the challenge of figuring out, what would an episode look like where we had to solve the issue of the day or the problem of the week with Oliver Queen as mayor as opposed to him gearing up as the Green Arrow. I think the other thing, when Marc and I talked about doing it and we talked about potentially doing more episodes like this going forward, is the idea that we want to start a conversation....It's important to at least talk about this, and at some point we did get away from that as a country, and we like the idea of hearing both sides -- and hearing both sides as fairly as possible."

You can check out the official synopsis for the episode below:

WILD DOG'S HISTORY IS REVEALED — A traumatic attack on City Hall triggers painful memories for Rene (Rick Gonzalez) about his family. Flashbacks reveal how Rene went from simple family man to a hero named Wild Dog.

Meanwhile, Oliver (Stephen Amell) must deal with the perpetrator behind the attack and realizes the best way to do so is as Mayor Queen instead of the Green Arrow. Tensions run high in the Arrow bunker.

Kristin Windell directed the episode written by Marc Guggenheim.

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Arrow airs Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW. This week's episode, "Spectre of the Gun," debuts on February 15.

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