Laurel Lance's Final Words To Oliver Queen Revealed In Arrow Season 5 Premiere

10/05/2016 09:11 pm EDT

Spoilers ahead for "Legacy," tonight's season five premiere of Arrow.

About two-thirds of the way through tonight's season premiere of Arrow on The CW, one of season four's big secrets gets spilled: what did Laurel Lance say to Oliver Queen just before her death?

It turns out, the answer is surprising, controversial...and pretty intuitive if you really think about it.

Moments before her death -- and the timeline here is a little hazy, since it seemed for a bit that she might make it through, before the camera pulled out of the room and suddenly she was crashing -- she asks Oliver to make sure that she isn't the last Canary. If her legacy lives on, she reasoned, a little part of her is always out there -- fighting beside the love of her life, fighting the good fight.

It's a scene that's likely to get some Laurel fans worked up: why would she ask to be replaced?

But it actually kind of makes sense. She was clearly at peace with her role in the big picture as she lay dying. She told Oliver that he had always been the love of her life, even though she knew he belonged with Felicity and urged him to fix that broken relationship. It seemed, even in the moments when she was "recovering," that Laurel was mentally preparing to die.

And setting up a succession plan is not only a pretty big part of that -- but it makes total sense. Laurel died a hero, and is remembered that way. Sacrificing oneself to fight a never-ending battle is fine, but if the battle is never-ending, and there's nobody there to replace you, you're a little bit of a drop in the bucket, right?

The question going forward will be how it's handled. When Evelyn Sharp tried to make herself the "new" Black Canary near the end of last season, Team Arrow soundly rejected the idea -- and now that she's on a trajectory to join Team Arrow 2.0, her secret identity will be Artemis, not Canary. Obviously Sara Lance is a Canary -- but not only is she not the Black Canary, but presently she's operating in secret and outside of time -- which isn't much of a legacy.

A popular theory has been that it might be Felicity Smoak who joins the team as a new Black Canary at some point, but that's fraught with peril. The schism in the Arrow fandom goes largely along Laurel/Felicity lines, so surrendering Felicity's unique identity to "steal" Laurel's secondhand would likely annoy almost everyone. Meanwhile, as badass as she was fighting Double Down in the season four premiere, Felicity is likely more useful to the team behind a keyboard than behind a mask.

We'll have to find out more as season five unfolds.

Arrow airs at 8 p.m. ET/PT on Wednesday nights on The CW.

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