In the fifth season of Arrow — one of the series’ most popular seasons and widely regarded as the biggest “bounce back” after a lot of fans had expressed frustration with season four — series co-creator and executive producer Marc Guggenheim wrote the episode “Spectre of the Gun,” better known to fans as “the gun control episode.” Pitting sympathetic characters against one another in an ideological debate, Guggenheim’s script attempted to comment on the gun debate in the United States in an age of mass shootings, without getting entirely bogged down in partisan politics. Ultimately, Guggenheim identifies it as the episode that he would most like to “do over.”
Guggenheim told EW that part of his failure in the episode was an attempt to show both sides of an emotionally-charged debate. At the time, though, just talking about gun violence in a critical way led to the assumption that Arrow was coming down hard on the side of increased regulation. Guggenheim seems to believe now that he could have written a stronger episode if he had just gone ahead and done something less wishy-washy and taken more of a stance.
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“I wrote 513, which was the ‘gun control’ episode,” Guggenheim said. “I thought that we were taking a big enough chance just by raising the specter of the issue, no pun intended. Looking back on it, especially in light of the number of mass shootings that unfortunately happened after that episode aired, I wish I had gotten higher up on my soapbox. I had an opportunity and an audience, and I was trying to show both sides of the argument, and I wish I had basically come down hard on one particular side.”
It’s hard to argue the point: the same people who would be upset by Arrow coming down a little harder on one side of the issue are likely the people who were already upset that there was a “gun control episode” to begin with. Trying to accommodate that group, then, likely hurt the episode’s ability to connect to people who went in expecting it to be more defintive, like John Ostrander and Vincent Giarrano’s 1992 comic Batman: Seduction of the Gun.
The episode centered heavily on Rene Ramirez (Rick Gonzalez), who will likely recur in Green Arrow and the Canaries when and if that show is picked up to series. You can check out Arrow‘s final few episodes (including the “Green Arrow and the Canaries” backdoor pilot episode) on The CW‘s website and app now, or buy the ten-episode final season on streaming video on demand platforms.
