The opening scene of Arrow Season 1 shows Oliver running through the forest of Lian Yu onto the rocky shoreline, trying to flag down a boat. He shoots a flaming arrow into a bonfire he built on the beach. The fishing boat sees the explosion and docks ashore. Ollie then surrenders himself and boards the ship that will get him back to Star City.
Back in 2012, Executive Producer Andrew Kreisberg said the series will end in the same place it began. His statement suggested the series finale will feature that same scene where Oliver is rescued. “Ideally by the last episode of the series, the very last flashback will be Oliver seeing the boat that rescued him in the pilot.”
However, that won’t be the case. Executive Producer Marc Guggenheim has revealed the last episode of the series won’t match up with the end of the flashbacks.
“Spoiler alert. That’s going to end up being the Season 5 finale,” Arrow showrunner Marc Guggenheim tells TVLine.
“It was really just a hope at that point [in 2012] that the show would run five years,” Guggenheim said of the original plan, “and we always thought that we would intercut the final moment of the series with the first moment of the series, that it would form one big Moebius strip.”
Guggenheim added that a part of him still wants to to do that, but decided against it. “I wouldn’t want to artificially extend the flashbacks [beyond five seasons], and I also wouldn’t want to artificially cut the show short. It would’ve been a beautifully elegant thing, and Five Years Ago Me would’ve loved it. But things change, and I do think it’ll make the Season 5 finale pretty awesome.”
Arrow Season 5 revolves around the conclusion of the last sequence of flashbacks. This year’s villain, Prometheus, has ties all the way back to the Season 1 flashbacks. So far, they’ve all taken place in Russia, but we still have yet to find out how Ollie ends up on Lian Yu once again.
“Look, we have some incredibly clear plans for what we want to do in the Season 5 finale,” Guggenheim said. “At the same time, we always leave ourselves room to be like, ‘…and throw this cliffhanger in, throw that twist in.’”
Just because Season 5 will conclude Oliver’s personal flashbacks doesn’t mean we mean they won’t live on in another form. After all, the flashbacks have been integral to Arrow’s story arcs. If Arrow is cleared for Season 6 (which seems likely, considering Guggenheim's new statements) they’ll just be “non-island flashbacks” and won’t tell a “serialized story.”
"Next year, in Season 6, what we'll end up doing is we'll do some episodes without any sort of flashbacks,” Guggenheim told IGN. “We've [also] established over the first four seasons of proof of concept that we can do flashback stories that don't involve what I call the island narrative, even when he's not on the island. We like when those non-island flashbacks sort of illuminate what's going on in the present day.”
Back in August, Producers Wendy Mericle and Marc Guggenheim teased the possibility of flashbacks continuing in Season 6 with different characters. Mericle named Mr. Terrific or possibly even a villain are on the table. Guggenheim is also interested in flash-forwards featuring Dig and Ollie.
Do you have a vision of how the flashbacks should continue? Let us know in the comments below!
Arrow’s midseason finale airs Wednesday, Dec. 7, at 8 p.m. on The CW.
