The series finale of Arrow gave fans of The CW’s Arrowverse one of its most enduring mysteries when John Diggle (David Ramsey), in the final moments of the episode, opened a mysterious glowing green box that had fallen to Earth from space. For many fans, that tease suggested that the box contained a Green Lantern ring and might, eventually deliver on the hope many fans had of Diggle becoming a Green Lantern. However, over the next few seasons across the rest of the Arrowverse, additional appearances from Diggle worked to unravel that mystery until, last season on The Flash, fans saw Diggle reject the cosmic offer the box held. Now, this week’s episode of The Flash, It’s My Party And I’ll Die If I Want To”, addresses the mystery one last time.
Warning: spoilers for this week’s episode of The Flash, “It’s My Party And I’ll Die If I Want To” beyond this point.
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In the episode, Oliver and Diggle finally get to have a long overdue conversation — the real goodbye they were denied when Oliver died during Crisis of Infinite Earths. Diggle gives Oliver a little update on his family, and then Oliver tells him that he’s been keeping an eye on them, and him too. Oliver tells Diggle that the cube he found was designed to tempt him and that rejecting it was the right thing to do. Oliver also tells him that now “all of [his] brightest days are ahead of [him]” because he will be spending them with his family.
With Diggle’s most trusted friend — someone with literal cosmic powers as the Spectre and someone he considers family — telling him that he did the right thing, it seems that this moment definitively concludes Diggle’s Green Lantern journey, at least for this corner of the Multiverse. Ramsey himself has previously indicated that the Green Lantern of it all may not be entirely resolved because Superman & Lois is a completely different world. The series has been established to take place on a separate Earth and it’s possible that things are very different there for Diggle.
“It’s not resolved,” Ramsey said (via The Direct). “Eric [Wallace] called me, showrunner of The Flash, and he had a pitch for me to end the saga, the Green Lantern Saga, within the Arrowverse. And the reason why he did is because the Arrowverse was ending, right? It’s gonna end with Flash and all the other shows would go. And we knew, not at the time, I knew but you didn’t know yet, that Todd [Helbing] was going to reveal in Superman & Lois that the Superman & Lois-verse, if you will, exists on another planet, on a different Earth, and these characters are still alive. And the idea is perhaps there’s a world where we can explore the Flash, or maybe just Barry Allen. Maybe he is Flash, maybe he isn’t. Is Oliver Queen alive? Maybe he is. Maybe the ring is still there.”
He went on to suggest that the development with Superman & Lois being a separate reality functions, in a sense, as a reboot of the Arrowverse, which allows for the possibility that Diggle’s Green Lantern story simply isn’t done in that reality.
“It’s almost a reboot. Superman & Lois allows us to reboot the Arrowverse in a way that we didn’t really think before,” Ramsey said. “And when he revealed that, when Todd initially revealed that, there were a lot of moans and groans about ‘Oh, we’re no longer in the Arrowverse.’ But I think it was smart. It was [Greg] Berlanti’s brainchild and I think it was smart because it allows us to grow outside of the Arrowverse, which we weren’t allowed to do. So, to answer your question is that the ring is still around. It exists in Superman & Lois, it’s been denied in the same way it was in the Arrowverse, but [John Diggle] didn’t go through the same thing.”
The Flash airs Wednesdays at 8/7c on The CW.
