If you were watching Arrow last night and thinking what a great job they did approximating the look and feel of Moira’s season two death scene, there’s a reason for that. While fans were shocked to see Oliver (Stephen Amell) take down Slade Wilson (Manu Bennett) and save his mother’s life in that scene — something that had played out very differently six seasons ago — it turns out the production didn’t have to hide Manu Bennett moving in and out of Vancouver in order to make the scene happen. Instead, they already had that footage on-hand. According to series co-creator Marc Guggenheim, Oliver’s beatdown of Deathstroke was actually shot for season two.
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No, it was not a potential alternative ending; Moira Queen (Susanna Thompson) was always going to die at the hands of Slade. Rather, the scene was shot as a potential dream sequence for after the death — and never used.
“It really started with a request I made to the postproduction team, which is I asked them for a reel of all the deleted scenes, including the deleted scenes that we haven’t released previously on home video,” Guggenheim told EW this morning. “When I was watching that, I saw the scene that we shot for the beginning of 223, [which] was originally going to begin with Oliver imagining if things had gone differently in 220, and if he had been able to save his mother’s life. And the moment I saw that, it solved a huge problem that we were wrestling with, which was: How do we basically tell the Arrow audience what happened in ‘Crisis’ without it being overly expositional and relying on you to have seen ‘Crisis?’ Showing it as opposed to telling it was checked off a huge box, obviously.”
Moira was one of a number of characters who had died during Oliver’s years-long war on crime who were brought back after Oliver played a key role in rebuilding the universe during “Crisis on Infinite Earths.” The final episode of Arrow also gave fans a glimpse at the post-“Crisis” versions of Tommy Merlyn (Colin Donnell), Quentin Lance (Paul Blackthorne), and Emiko Queen (Sea Shimooka), with more changes to the universe either shown or implied.
Other characters — like Oliver’s father Robert (Jamey Sheridan) or Samantha Clayton (Anna Hopkins), the mother of his son William, were not brought back (or, in the case of Clayton, at least not explicitly brought back, although it is possible she is out there somewhere, and we will find out in Green Arrow and the Canaries if it goes to series).
You can check out Arrow‘s final few episodes on The CW‘s website and app now, or buy the ten-episode final season on streaming video on demand platforms.
