Arrow returned from midseason break tonight, and its newest episode revealed some pretty interesting details about the Arrowverse’s future.
Spoilers for the midseason premiere of Arrow, “My Name is Emiko Queen”, below!
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While most of the episode dealt with the introduction and M.O. of Emiko Queen (Shea Shimooka), some sequences flashed forward into the bleak future that has periodically popped up throughout the season. And as the scenes revealed, things weren’t as bleak as they’d initially seemed.
As it turned out, the future version of The Glades was thriving, in a way that appeared drastically different to the outer edges of Star City. As audiences quickly learned, this was thanks to The Glades’ mayor, who was none other than an older version of Rene Ramirez/Wild Dog (Rick Gonzalez).
Throughout the episode, Rene was visited by both Zoe Ramirez (Andrea Sixtos) and Dinah Drake (Juliana Harkavy), but refused to listen to their warnings about a plot to blow up Star City. By the episode’s end, Rene relayed that information to one of his staffers, as well as the idea that the bomb plans were tied to the death of Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards). The staffer claimed that Felicity needed to be “taken care of”, which essentially confirmed that Rene’s staff had some sort of ties to the death.
The fact that Rene essentially opposes the main characters we’ve already seen in the flash forwards is certainly interesting, considering the arc that he’s undergone in Arrow‘s present-day events. To an extent, his mindset might’ve been hinted at in his alliance with Emiko, considering the relationship both have to The Glades.
And while it’s unclear exactly how things will shake out in the rest of Arrow‘s flash-forwards, showrunner Beth Schwartz hinted that it will be worth fans keeping an eye on.
“[The Glades are] actually a complete opposite of what we’ve seen so far in Star City,” Schwartz told ComicBook.com. “There’s actually no crime there. It’s beautiful and the sunny side of the city, which is obviously completely different from our present day, so it’s not completely bleak.”
“We’re going to parallel those worlds a lot more in the last chapter of the season,” Schwartz said, explaining that the storytelling would take a form similar to what Arrow often did with its flashbacks during the first five seasons. “The first chapter, definitely, we opened a lot of questions. There’s a lot of mystery, and then, one by one, we’re going to start to reveal all those mysteries and then we’ll have a lot more paralleling of our characters from our present day to how they became who they are in the future.”
Arrow airs Mondays at 8/7c on The CW.
