Arrow Showrunner Teases Felicity (and More) Returning for Final Episode

On Friday, Arrow fans got a huge surprise, one that they’d been hoping for pretty much since the end of Season 7 earlier this year. Emily Bett Rickards will return as Felicity Smoak in the series finale of Arrow. The news came in the form of tweet from series star Stephen Amell, but now executive producer Marc Guggenheim is also weighing in, teasing not just Rickards’ return as Felicity but the return of more “old friends” in the show’s upcoming final weeks as well.

On Friday, Guggenheim shared Amell’s tweet about Rickards’ return with his own comments about the good things coming to the show as it works its way to the ending. You can check it out below.

“I prefer it, too,” Guggenheim wrote in reference to such big announcements as Rickards’ return coming from official sources — such as himself or Amell. “We couldn’t be happier or more thrilled. No other way to do our finale. You’ll find [out] about more old friends returning in the coming weeks…”

At this point, it’s not clear what old friends Guggenheim is referring to, though there have already been many surprising and welcome returns. Whoever these old friends end up being, though, it will be hard to top Rickards’ return. Fans have been hoping since she announced her departure that Rickards would return for the final season, with particular emphasis on the “Crisis on Infinite Earths” crossover and the series finale. “Crisis” has wrapped principal production with no sign of Rickards, but it seems she will be back for the show’s final sendoff. Since Oliver and Felicity are married now, and Oliver is expected to die in “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” the two most likely scenarios are that Felicity either appears for her husband’s funeral in the present-day story, or that she shows up in the 2040 storyline for some kind of reunion.

The latter was hinted at during last season’s finale, when the Felicity of 2040 left her grown children behind and basically implied that she was going to go see Oliver again. When The Monitor appeared and opened a breach, he warned her that where she was going, there was no going back. She walked through anyway.

During an appearance at MCM London earlier this year, Rickards told fans that, while network president Mark Pedowitz has previously said that the door would be open for her to return if she wanted to, the decision wasn’t completely hers.

“(A return is) not completely up to me,” Rickards said. “Never say never.”

She added at the time that she did not know if it was strictly necessary for a return, since the story had set up her destiny (and that of her kids) pretty clearly.

“We sent her off in a beautiful way and she lives on in these people,” she added. “I see her everywhere I go, so it’s not totally goodbye.”