The fourth season of Arrow returns on Jan. 20 and fans of the hit CW show can’t wait to see what happens to the main cast after the events of the mid-season finale.
However, with leaked set photos and popular fan theories crowding the Internet it’s hard to not know what’s going to happen in Arrow season 4 before the episode is even aired, but Arrow season 4’s executive producer Wendy Mericle spoke to TVLine about the rumors surrounding the show.
SPOILER ALERT! The Following will spoil the events of season 4, proceed at your own risk.
The last seconds of the Arrow Season 4 mid-season finale showed Ollie holding a hurt and unconscious Felicity in his arms leaving viewers to speculate her fate.
Set photos of an upcoming episode of Arrow season 4 show Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards) in a wheelchair after Damien Dhark’s goons pumped her and Ollie’s limousine with bullet holes.
But now Mericle has commented about Felicity being Oracle conversations to TVLine.
“That’s something we definitely talked about [doing] with Felicity in the beginning…. But yeah, it will not be Oracle, sadly,” Mericle told TVLine. “People have to tune in to see what happens.”
The set photos left fans wondering if Felicity will become the DC Comics hero, Oracle. This was a popular theory since Season 3 when the Felicity-centric episode revealing some of her backstory was originally titled “Oracle” but later changed.
So it may be that Felicity being in a wheelchair is a temporary thing for the character, or the Arrow season 4 EP is using misdirection. Perhaps Felicity will be permanently in a wheelchair but not use the “Oracle” codename. We’ll have to wait and see.
On the other hand, Arrow season 4 showrunner Marc Guggenheim told IGN about what fans should expect in the second half of the season including about the big bad for this season.
"The back half of the season, we're pretty much following the same structure that we have in seasons past where obviously the Big Bad gears up. That said, we're going to throw a hard six in episode 15 that I think will surprise people," he told IGN while promoting Legends of Tomorrow at the Television Critics Association winter press tour. "We're going to do something that's never been done before on Arrow with the Big Bad. 15 is a real game-changer episode for us."
Guggenheim did clarify his comments to IGN that this “twist” is not a character death but something to do with the Big Bad for Arrow season 4.
Guess that means, perhaps, Dhark is being told by an even bigger bad this season or there’s a part of Dhark’s past that we’ll learn later on.
We won’t know until Arrow Season 4 returns Jan. 20 but in the meantime, let us know your theories in the comments section.
