Arrow EP on Series Finale: “There’s Going to Be a Lot of Tears”

We’re still a month away from seeing Arrow‘s final season premiere, but the show’s cast and crew are already looking ahead to the final episode. In a recent interview with Entertainment Tonight, showrunner Beth Schwartz spoke about the task of wrapping up the eight-season run of the hit The CW series, and teased that it will be an emotional process.

“It definitely feels like this is the right time for the series to end, but I feel like it’s not going to feel quite real until that last script of the finale comes out. And then I feel like there’s going to be a lot of tears,” she admitted. “I’m sure it’ll be the same thing on the last day of filming on set. That’s when it’s going to feel even more real when we’re actually going through it.”

Schwartz also revealed that work on the series finale has already begun, but that the minutia of how the episode will play out has evolved to an extent.

“In the [writers’] room [Monday], we started working on the series finale so it felt very real,” Schwartz explained. “I couldn’t believe it. Just saying it, it felt a little bit surreal. Towards the end of every season, we start breaking what’s happening next season and this year, there isn’t a next season. It feels very strange.”

“Now that it’s here, we’re obviously going to add more things that did evolve from this season specifically,” Schwartz added, before confirming that she and fellow executive producer Marc Guggenheim haven’t shifted on “where we wanted to end it.”

Given everything that Season 8 has to deal with – namely, Oliver Queen’s (Stephen Amell) supposed death in the coming “Crisis on Infinite Earths” – it will certainly be interesting to see how the show’s final moments shakes out.

“The good news is unlike Game of Thrones or unlike Lost, were not burdened with having to answer a question,” Guggenheim told ComicBook.com earlier this summer. “We’re not burdened with ‘who’s going to sit on the Iron Throne?’ or “what was the island?’ so we get to do, I think, a much more character-based ending. So, at the same time, the complication for us is that we also have Crisis and I think a lot of the stuff that was always in my head in terms of how to end the show we’re now actually going to end up doing in the crossover instead so it’s like now what does the series finale become? But, you know, we’ve got plans.”

“I’m really excited about it. The goal is to make it satisfying for the fans, but the good news for us is we don’t have the challenges that Lost, or Game of Thrones had,” he continued. We also don’t have the ratings, so there’s that, too. But I feel the pain of Damon, Benioff, and Weiss. It’s hard. It’s a hard thing to do in a way that satisfies everyone. I also think, because I’ve been thinking how does one end a series, there’s what the initial reaction to something is and then there’s how it stands the test of time and those two things are not always the same.”

Arrow‘s final season will begin Tuesday, October 15th, at 9/8c on The CW.