What Does Death Mean On Arrow? A Producer Weighs In

Warning: Spoilers ahead for tonight’s episode of Arrow, titled “Eleven-Fifty-Nine.”

During a screening of tonight’s Arrow episode earlier this week in Los Angeles, series executive producer Marc Guggenheim was asked the big, obvious question:

How are we supposed to take tonight’s heartbreaking death seriously, if there are a million ways to bring characters back from the dead on Arrow?

“I think the thing that we’ve sort of recognized — ever since Lazarus pit, parallel universes, et cetera, et cetera — we definitely recognized across all three shows that when we kill off a character, it means something different now,” Guggenheim said to a group of assembled reporters. “I’m not going to put a qualitative judgement on whether it is more or less impactful, I’ll leave that to the audience and to you guys, but certainly we acknowledge that there’s a difference, you know? And I think you know, Arrow much more so than Flash or Legends, traffics in death. You know, we started off the series with the apparent death of Sara Lance and the actual death of Robert Queen, and a hero who murdered people, and death is for better or for worse, death is part of the show.”

“What we’re finding is that death now, as it should by the way when you start to get as we are, pushing into season five, the show has to evolve, it has to change, and the concept of death on the show is evolving and changing as we’ve already seen with Sara Lance,” Guggenheim said. “You know and again like with seeing Laurel in parallel universe, there’s a world where we do an episode where Oliver Queen meets the Laurel Lance of Earth-2. That’s now on the table, you know? Time travel is now on the table, so as the show has evolved, I’m being very long winded, as the show has evolved, so has death, and again I’ll leave it to you guys to decide if death is more or less impactful as a result.”

Arrow heads into a brief hiatus after tonight’s shocker, and will be back with a new episode in a few weeks. The series airs Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.

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