With Arrow headed to Coast City, California, in this season’s flashbacks, many fans are hoping against hope that Hal Jordan — the best known member of the Green Lantern Corps and a life-long Coast City resident — might show up.
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Producers and actors on Arrow have dismissed the idea, not totally denying the possibility but downplaying it, suggesting that Warner Bros. might not want to have too many characters appearing in both the films and TV series at the same time. Given that they already have Deadshot, Amanda Waller, The Flash, Bruce Wayne, Alfred Pennyworth and possibly Jimmy Olsen, that’s probably an understandable instinct.
But given Oliver Queen’s long connection to Hal in the comics, and the fact that he’s in Coast City,it’s probably safe to assume we’ll get — at a minimum — a few winks and nods to the importance of the city in DC’s lore and Oliver’s personal history.
What could they do, without actually using Hal Jordan himself if he’s really off-limits? We’ve got a few ideas…
FERRIS AIRCRAFT
The most obvious choice — if only because we’ve seen the company logo a bunch of times in the Arrowverse, is that we’ll see Ferris Aircraft, where Hal Jordan works and Carol Ferris is an executive, play a role in the story going forward.
Remember, too, that we aren’t just talking about the instantly-recognizable characters. If Ferris Air were to play any role in the show, we could easily have it be Carl Ferris, whose military contracts might put him in the Amanda Waller storyline (or, heck, Matthew Shrieve for that matter).
Beyond that, we could plausibly see some of the Geoff Johns-created characters introduced duringthe early issue of his Green Lantern run a decade ago, before everything went almost exclusively to space. Heck, that’s the biggest reason any of Hal’s stuff could be accessible here: there’s little chance any of it would end up in a movie that has to service more than one Green Lantern and the Justice League tie-ins.
TOM KALMAKU
This one is worth repeating, even though he’s technically a part of the Ferris Air crew.
Why?
Well, he’s Hal’s best friend, and a character who was actually handled pretty well by Arrow‘s Greg Berlanti and Marc Guggenheim in the flawed Green Lantern script.
We’ve also seen that Oliver will be taking on a kind of proto-Arrow thing in Coast City in the flashback sequences…so that begs the question: will he have a proto-Team Arrow? If so, Tom seems like an ideal candidate to be the not-Felicity tech person…and that would explain why Oliver recruited Felicity so early on: he knew he’d need one!
HAL’S CAREER JUMPING
Okay, so Oliver is independently wealthy in the “real” world, but while he’s presumed dead, a man has to eat.
So far, he’s either been on the island where we know he hunted and gathered, or has been with Swiss Family Katana, who fed him. So…how’s Ollie going to find a way to support himself without blowing his secret?
The obvious answer seems to be Amanda Waller, who visits him in the trailer, but what if he just gets part-time gigs around time and works a variety of jobs, unable to really hold one down? That’s pretty much how Hal got along over the years, after all…!
ALIENS
The CW’s DC Universe features superheroes, supervillains, metahumans, and time travel.
What doesn’t it have (yet)? Aliens.
Sure, you can argue that Hawkgirl and Hawkman might be Thanagarian, but nobody has confirmed that so far, as far as I know…and even if they have, it’ll be probably two months into the season before we meet those guys.
Meanwhile, we know that a Ferris Air test pilot disappeared under mysterious circumstances. What if we didn’t get Hal but we did get some of the blowback from humanity suddenly being on the Corps’ (and their enemies’) radar.
BOOM.
What could possibly scar Oliver badly enough to send him back to the island in time to be rescued at the start of Season One? What if his flashback hometown was utterly destroyed?
Oliver having failed his adoptive city in the worst possible way could give him the motivation to come to town with that Season One-sized chip on his shoulder.
Obviously, you can’t have the whole city die; not only would it have come up at some point in the intervening years, but we’ve had references to Coast City on the show that weren’t “where Coast City used to be.” Still, the attack that destroyed Coast City is probably the thing more people know about the town than anything else, so who’s to say they can’t riff on it in some smaller-but-still-devastating way?
