Arrow Season Two: Five Finale Predictions

Tonight's season finale for Arrow promises to be a huge, chaotic and exciting battle between Team Arrow, the League of Assassins and Deathstroke's Mirakuru Army. All the while, A.R.G.U.S. will have a drone cruising toward the city, ready to level it on the word of Amanda Waller, who we already know won't be too happy with Team Arrow after Lyla Michaels and John Diggle free members of the Suicide Squad to help distract her. So...yeah. Lots of stuff is going to happen. What exactly do we expect to happen? Well, we've got a lot of ideas, but here are five of them...

Oliver won't kill Slade Maybe he'll join the Suicide Squad, maybe somebody else like Canary or Diggle will do it...but Slade won't die by Oliver's hand. It would totally negate the whole theme of the season, which is that he has to be something else to honor Tommy's memory. At the start of the season, Oliver committed himself to being a hero, not a vigilante -- and by the end of "Streets of Fire," the police department was ready to work with him and his pals, essentially confirming that as far as the rudderless ship of Starling City is concerned (the mayor, police chief and DA are all dead, so they're looking for leaders), Oliver and company are heroes. And, yeah, heroes don't kill unless they have no other options.

Merlyn isn't dead, obviously Whether he can actually seduce Thea to his side with the "I won't lie to you" offer that we've yet to actually hear is another matter.

No Team Arrow fatalities Marc Guggenheim told Digital Spy, "The thing about Arrow is we've shown a willingness to lose characters when a lot of other shows might keep them around. Let me put it this way… There's one character who you will not be seeing at the start of season 3." Obviously, it's easy to assume that means someone will die -- but I don't think so. I think he's talking about Sara Lance, who will head off with the League of Assassins at the end of the finale to "pay back" the favor that Ra's al Ghul is doing her by sending them along to help save the city. We see that Slade plans on making him choose between Laurel and Felicity -- and let's be honest, neither of those characters are going anywhere. I think the fatality we get in this episode will be on the island, where Slade and Sara will "die" but then the present day will mirror and conflict that with people making decisions to go the other way. We'll give ourselves a margin of error, though, and call it loved ones. I'm pretty convinced none of the big guns (or Laurel) are going to buy it this week, but there's an outside chance we won't see Lyla Michaels (who swoops in heroically to try and save her ex-husband and his city), Nyssa Raatko (ditto, but ex-girlfriend) or Quentin Lance again.

At least one fatality on Team Deathstroke It seems inevitable that either Slade or Isabel will die -- and it's our theory that whoever is left over after the fact will become a looming threat for future seasons, perhaps restricted to the Suicide Squad for now but with an ax to grind. Obviously there will be some fatalities among the freed convicts; it's pretty much inevitable when you consider that you've got people who are enraged and running around destroying everything, and who probably won't know just what it is they've gotten themselves into until the cure has already been shot into them and they're standing there in a fight with a member of the League of Assassins.

A huge cliffhanger Will it deal with Oliver's long-lost child? Barry Allen waking up from the coma? Secrets revealed by Isabel about her past with Robert Queen? In any event, it seems likely we'll have a pretty massive cliffhanger at the end of this episode. Why? Well, while we didn't anticipate the big cliffhanger at the end of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., that's because we thought it was going to be answering questions raised throughout the season. Arrow is, per the showrunners, essentially acting as a massive finale for two seasons' worth of stories and kickstarting a whole new era for the characters. And a new era, needs a little bit of setup, lest the premiere next year seem totally alien. Of course, there's always the idea that Ra's al Ghul -- whose daughter may have defied him to come here to help Canary, and who wants to bring in and punish Malcolm Merlyn -- could play a role, too...