Marc Guggenheim Says Arrow Will Revisit Havenrock This Season

Felicity Smoak and Rory Regan aren’t quite done dealing with the fallout from the destruction of […]

September 5, 2017, 9:15pm

Felicity Smoak and Rory Regan aren’t quite done dealing with the fallout from the destruction of Havenrock at the end of Arrow season 4, Marc Guggenheim told ComicBook.com.

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When a nuclear warhead was pointed at Star City and its population of millions, Felicity couldn’t stop it — so she redirected it to a much smaller city along its route, killing around 10,000 people, including the parents of Rory Regan, whose suit of mystical rags — a family heirloom that also grants the wearer super-powers — protected him.

When Rory, also known as Ragman, came to Star City and joined up with Team Arrow, nobody knew that he had come from Havenrock. Once that revelation was made, it strained his relationship with the guilt-ridden Felicity, who finally admitted her sins to her friend and teammate.

Rory, though stunned and repulsed, took the news primarily as a disappointment rather than a betrayal, and ultimately understood why Felicity felt she had to make the hard decision, even if he couldn’t completely forgive her for it.

It was a display of understanding and patience a lot of Arrow fans didn’t expect since, in the show’s five-year history, most big lies have resulted in righteous fury and conflict when they came to light.

“That’s exactly right and that’s exactly why we didn’t do that. In fact, when we were in the room, I was very much like, ‘God, the last thing I want to do is…” series executive producer Marc Guggenheim said when we presented him with exactly that observation. After trailing off, he recovered: “It’s a story we felt we owed off of the end of last year and particularly once one of the writers had pitched the idea that Rory was from Havenrock and that his rags had protected him and that seemed really interesting to us. Once we hit upon that, we definitely realized that we were headed towards some sort of revelation between Felicity and Rory and I was very much like, ‘How do we make this interesting without relying on what has become a trope of character flying off the handle and screaming at the person?’ What was great was that Joe’s performance really sold what was a tricky acting beat of striking that balance of more disappointment than rage. Obviously, we wrote it in that direction, but it really took Joe and his performance and I give Emily props, as well. It required both actors to really sell the needle we were trying to thread.”

And while it seemed like the team got closure right before the “Invasion!” crossover, the resolution between Felicity and Rory still apparently has some work cut out for it.

“By the way, we haven’t seen the end of that story,” Guggenheim told us. “I mean, obviously, we’ve gotten the secret out and Rory and Felicity have aired their feelings about it, but we’re actually going to revisit it in episode 12. Episode 12 draws together a lot of threads from the first 11 episodes of the season and it ties off some of them, and it just connects different things that weren’t previously connected. But one of those threads is going to be this Havenrock situation and, I think, hopefully, if we’ve done our job correctly, just the fact that we’re revisiting Havenrock and then the way we do it, with respect to Felicity and Rory, will be surprising.”