The Flash Showrunner Says Fans Should Rewatch the Green Arrow & The Canaries Backdoor Pilot Before "Armageddon"

The Flash returns on Tuesday with the first part of its five-part "Armageddon" event that kicks off The CW series' eighth season and, as part of the event, a number of familiar faces will be returning to help Barry Allen/Team Flash (Grant Gustin) to deal with this latest catastrophic threat, including Mia Queen (Katherine McNamara). The character was last seen in the series finale of Arrow, "Fadeout", attending her father's funeral, but had begun her own story in the series' penultimate episode, "Green Arrow and The Canaries". Now, according to The Flash showrunner Eric Wallace, fans might want to give that episode a rewatch before "Armageddon".

Speaking with The Flash Podcast, Wallace was asked if there was a specific character that he had been dying to write for who didn't normally appear on The Flash and while he said he was eager to write for everyone who is a part of "Armageddon", he did note that he "especially loved writing for Mia Queen" and then suggested fans rewatch the penultimate episode of Arrow which had been set up as a backdoor pilot for a Green Arrow and The Canaries spinoff.

"You might need to. I'm not saying the Black Canaries are in the show alongside Mia, but those events mattered, right? They mattered," Wallace said. "So be prepared to continue Mia's journey in a very unexpected way, but yet in a way that makes sense and honors her past. That was very important to us."

Green Arrow & The Canaries would have followed Mia Queen/Green Arrow alongside Laurel Lance/Black Siren (Katie Cassidy) and Dinah Drake/Black Canary (Juliana Harkavy) in the year 2040 and the backdoor pilot left things on a bit of a cliffhanger with Mia's brother, William, being kidnapped by cloaked figures. The series was officially passed on in January of this year. Producer Marc Guggenheim had previously indicated that the mysteries left from the backdoor pilot would eventually be resolved, though at the time he suggested that resolution would come through a comic book tie-in, though other shows were not out of the question.

"There are burning questions," Guggenheim explained to TVLine last year. "Certainly, the backdoor pilot ended with the cliffhanger of William's abduction. And I do think we owe answers to a lot of those moments and questions."

"My instinct would be to try to answer those questions in the form of, like, a comic book tie-in - which is not to say that it couldn't be done on the other shows," Guggenheim continued. "When you're dealing with another time period, the year 2040 in this case, the only show that could handle that or really deal with those questions is Legends [of Tomorrow]. [But that] is a tricky bit of business since the tonal mashup between Legends and Canaries is so very different. On the other hand, you've got Sara, who is sort of the connective glue there... I look at these things as 'quality problems." I love the fact that we now have a universe of shows that allows us to ask ourselves these questions and explore different things and answer questions from different shows, but we also have comic books as an outlet, as well."

The Flash airs Tuesdays at 8/7c on The CW. "Armageddon" kicks off on November 16th with "Armageddon, Part 1."