‘Arrow’ Looks to the Future in “Star City 2040” Preview

The CW has released a new preview for “Star City 2040”, the sixteenth episode of Arrow‘s seventh season.

The episode is expected to largely focus on the show’s flash-forward sequences, which have been popping up throughout Season 7 thus far. Based off the promo, Mia Smoak (Katherine McNamara) will definitely play a focus, with the episode even set to feature her birth in the present day.

“We’re going to parallel those worlds a lot more in the last chapter of the season,” showrunner Beth Schwartz recently told ComicBook.com. “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.”

Asked whether they would carry over some of the mysteries that the show has been laying out into season eight, though, Schwartz suggested that fans will get all the answers they need this year.

“No, we’re going to pretty much answer I think almost everything this season, and a lot of those answers are going to happen in the next few episodes,” Schwartz said. “We have an all flash-forward episode in 16 where we’re really going to dive in deep to the characters and answer mostly everything we setup in the first half.”

Of course, this look inside the Arrowverse’s future has a slightly different significance, now that the series has announced that it will be ending with a ten-episode eighth season.

“This was a difficult decision to come to, but like every hard decision we’ve made for the past seven years, it was with the best interests of Arrow in mind,” producers Beth Schwartz, Greg Berlanti, and Marc Guggenheim said in a statement. “We’re heartened by the fact that Arrow has birthed an entire universe of shows that will continue on for many years to come. We’re excited about crafting a conclusion that honors the show, its characters and its legacy and are grateful to all the writers, producers, actors, and — more importantly — the incredible crew that has sustained us and the show for over seven years.”

You can check out the official synopsis for “Star City 2040” below!

“FLASH FORWARD TO THE FUTURE

Mia (guest star Katherine McNamara) and William (guest star Ben Lewis) venture into the Glades on a dangerous mission. There they run into Dinah (Juliana Harkavy), Roy (Colton Haynes) and Zoe (guest star Andrea Sixtos) who deliver some devastating news. The flash forwards share highlights from Mia’s childhood with Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards).

James Bamford directed the episode written by Beth Schwartz & Oscar Balderrama.”

Arrow airs Mondays at 8/7c on The CW. “Star City 2040” will air on March 18th.