Things We Hope to See in the Arrow Season 6 Premiere

Looking ahead at next season’s DC premieres on The CW, probably the hardest one to really guess about is Arrow.

The nature of the cliffhanger didn’t leave us much to work with: the supporting cast is possibly (but almost certainly not) dead, and Lian Yu is pretty much dead as a location for future storytelling, but in all other ways, we don’t know anything much about what could be coming next time.

Compare that to Supergirl, where we know she will be dealing with the loss of Mon-El while her sister deals with whatever happens following her proposal to Maggie; to The Flash, which will apparently have a new title lead for the start of next season; and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, where time is broken and everything — literally everything — is up in the air.

Yeah, makes it a little harder to make credible guesses about what might be coming next on Arrow.

Doesn’t stop us from thinking about what we hope we might see, though…!

FALLOUT

Following up on that epic cliffhanger, the first and most important thing is that we don’t just cut to six months from now, and people are either dead or alive, and there’s no real explanation for why.

…Actually, that could be cool as a device for flashing back to the island to tell the story of how people were saved and recovered. That comes with both an upside and a downside, though, since season 6 will be the first season of the series without a flashback storyline, including one in the first episode back might be a gamble since it would feel like they were trying to cling to the past.

Do it right, and it could be awesome, but do it wrong and everyone will just be annoyed that the show didn’t pick up the premiere right where the finale left off.

That’s what we think they should do: start right where they left off, and start the episode with Oliver running over the now-destroyed terrain of Lian Yu.

It would be a nice callback to the pilot (and most subsequent premieres), and that alone would fit the “rebooted” feel of the sixth season well.

 

 

CONSEQUENCES

Here’s where we’re torn: usually, we aren’t huge fans of big deaths just to push the “importance” of a big story.

The way the season ended, though, is begging for some long-term consequences, the likes of which on a show like Arrow generally come from character deaths.

At a bare minimum, the episode should explore the consequences of Black Siren — someone we know is a series regular next season — being betrayed and left to die by Prometheus.

Since she was with Team Arrow the last time we saw her, that likely means she will have been saved by the people she was trying to murder — and that should be interesting to see her react to, considering that all the chaos and violence she was committing in season 5 came down to loyalty to Prometheus because he rescued her and she “didn’t owe Oliver Queen a thing.”

As much as we’d love to limit the casualties, though, it does seem like the nature of that cliffhanger demands somebody make a sacrifice. Our money is on either Deathstroke or Quentin Lance, although we really hope we’re wrong.

 

THE VILLAIN

At this point, Arrow was so consumed with the Prometheus story, and the story demanded so much real estate as the season wound down, that we don’t have a really good idea of who or what next season’s big bad will be.

We’ve got a lot of ideas — including a number of characters we’ve already seen who might be upgraded to “big bad” status with a little motivation — but one thing that was missing from Prometheus’s scary and badass introduction at the start of season 5 was his motivation.

That’s obviously on purpose; Prometheus came into the season as a kind of Jason Voorhees/Michael Myers kind of character, and the lack of any clear insight into his endgame is part of what made him seem so scary and monolithic. Once it was finally revealed that it all started with the death of his father, that was a shocking revelation that came with its own story implications.

This time around, we’d love to learn a little about the big bad and their intention up top, if only to avoid falling into The Flash‘s trap of having a big, increasingly predictable surprise reveal around the same point in every season.

…Of course, if it’s handled well, we could be persuaded otherwise…!

 

OLICITY

Oliver and Felicity have been slowly edging back in the direction of a relationship over the last few episodes of season 5, and that’s important becuase the pair really never had the on-screen heart-to-heart that their breakup demanded after it took up so much real estate in the previous two seasons.

The balance turned out to be pretty perfect for they story they were telling, even if it was maddening for shippers who wanted to find out what was going on with their favorite couple sooner than they did.

Of course, if we’re going to pick up right where we left off, it’s a question of how much the episode can cram into 42 minutes-ish of runtime. Oliver told Felicity when she wanted to have a moment in the finale that they would talk about it when they got off the island — and that seems like it might be a central preoccupation of the first episode back.

Either way, there’s absolutely a way to address these two’s relationship status going forward without making it a focus of what’s likely to be an already-packed episode and doing all the different pieces, including Olicity, a disservice. It’s just a landing they have to stick, and after seeing the handling of the relationship in the last few episodes of the season we’re pretty sure they can manage it.

 

TEAM ARROW

Team Arrow is looking very different these days: Black Canary II and Wild Dog have never had an adventure with Oliver where Prometheus’s master plan wasn’t in play, so now that the team has, as far as they know, completed its primary objective, how do they fit into the big picture?

We’d love to see Team Arrow get a little bit of a reboot, maybe a change of focus or tactics, in season 6. We aren’t sure exactly what, but doing the same thing with slightly different characters year-in and year-out feels kind of self-defeating, and we’re hoping that, if nothing else, Oliver learned from Prometheus that he needs to be better on his feet.

Every move Oliver made, Prometheus could counter or predict — even when new team members arrived. That’s iike a baseball team that can’t understand why they’re losing even though they brought in a superstar pitcher: sometimes, it’s the coaching, dude. Maybe Oliver needs to take a long look at what he and the team are doing, keep what works, and discard some of the rest.

Anyway, the point of all that is we’re hoping to see a renewed sense of direction and purpose inside the Arrowcave, and to kick off a little bit of the rust that’s been accumulating while they dealt with the major crises of the last two seasons is a good way to do that.

 

MORE ARROW

After a violent shipwreck, billionaire playboy Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) was missing and presumed dead for five years before being discovered alive on a remote island in the North China Sea. He returned home to Star City, bent on righting the wrongs done by his family and fighting injustice. As the Green Arrow, he protects his city with the help of former soldier John Diggle (David Ramsey), computer-science expert Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards), his vigilante-trained sister Thea Queen (Willa Holland), Deputy Mayor Quentin Lance (Paul Blackthorne), brilliant inventor Curtis Holt (Echo Kellum), and his new recruits, street-savvy Rene Ramirez (Rick Gonzalez) and meta-human Dinah Drake (Juliana Harkavy).

Oliver has finally solidified and strengthened his crime-fighting team only to have it threatened when unexpected enemies from his past return to Star City, forcing Oliver to rethink his relationship with each member of his “family”.

Based on the characters from DC, ARROW is from Bonanza Productions Inc. in association with Berlanti Productions and Warner Bros. Television, with executive producers Greg Berlanti (“The Flash,” “Supergirl”), Marc Guggenheim (“DC’s Legends of Tomorrow,” “Eli Stone”), Wendy Mericle (“Desperate Housewives,” “Eli Stone”), Andrew Kreisberg (“The Flash,” “Eli Stone,” “Warehouse 13”) and Sarah Schechter (“The Flash,” “DC’s Legends of Tomorrow”).

More Arrow news:

The Internet Reacts To Arrow’s Insane Season 5 Finale

Arrow: Did [SPOILER] Really Die?

The Arrow Easter Egg That Sealed One Character’s Fate

Arrow: Who Is Deathstroke’s [SPOILER]?