There’s an ongoing debate in the office about Susan Williams’ true intentions. At first, I thought she was just an overeager reporter. Now, it’s starting to look like she could be Bratva, or at least have interests that stem from a history with Konstantin Kovar’s organization. But my colleague thinks otherwise. Susan Williams is just a really, really good reporter trying to land a big story: Oliver Queen’s five-year secret.
I want to believe that Susan Williams is planning on pushing Oliver to reveal himself as Green Arrow to the citizens of Star City, but for some reason I don’t buy it 100 percent yet. If Susan is such an eager journalist that she really wanted to expose Oliver, why would she start sleeping with him? That crosses the ethical line and suggests her intentions as a reporter may just be a cover for something bigger. But at the same time, if she is evil, her arc may be a little too similar to Isabel Rochev’s from Season 2.
She could be undercover for Bratva, or Kovar’s organization, or a relative of Kovar. While Oliver and Anatoly appear to be on good terms by the end of the “Bratva” episode, Oliver made a life-long oath to the Bratva he has failed to keep. Anatoly made it fairly clear Oliver would eventually have to pay for choosing to leave the organization. It’s possible Susan Williams is an undercover Brava member, gathering intel to finally take down Oliver once and for all, by getting close to him and gathering enough evidence to expose his true story.
What doesn’t make sense about the Bratva theory is that Anatoly already knows pretty much everything there is to know about Oliver. So if that were the case, her plan may be behind Anatoly’s back. That, or she’s just creating a paper trail.
We still have yet to see the Kovar flashbacks end, but if Oliver ends up killing him, that could be a motive for Prometheus or Susan Williams, or both. Susan Williams could be working undercover for Kovar, and maybe Prometheus is even Kovar’s son? It’s hard because if Susan Williams were on someone's side, you’d assume she’d already know more about Oliver, but again, she could be making a paper trail for herself. There wasn’t shock value to her reaction when she found out Oliver wasn’t on the island for five years, saw his Bratva tattoo, or that he could be the Green Arrow, or when learning he was a Bratva captain. The grin on Susan’s face when she saw that picture suggested she knows more about Oliver’s past than she'd previously let on.
There’s also the vodka thing. The “Bratva” episode had tons of prolonged vodka shots and the bottles Anatoly had were the same as the one Susan had. And there's also the whole Christopher Chance thing. Susan Williams acquired a photo of Oliver in the same place as Chance. But the suspicious thing is Susan Williams implied she already knew Human Target, saying the fake mayoral assassination “felt like his work.” Weird. That could mean she has a connection to Anatoly, who first knew of Chance when Oliver needed his help back in Russia. Her investigator also seems to have a suspicious amount of lot of access, almost like putting out this story and gathering evidence against Oliver is her part in bringing him down.
When TV Line asked Executive Producer Wendy Mericle about the the camera's extraordinarily long pause on the bottle of russian vodka after Oliver kissed Susan, she said, “Were we too obvious with that?”
“I would call that foreshadowing more than anything else. Susan is certainly on that [Oliver-in-Russia] train, for sure.”
So if Susan is on that Russia train, my prediction is that she’s related to Konstantin Kovar somehow and her arc will link up with the flashbacks. Mericle also said previously that Talia Al Ghul plays a key role in the Prometheus mystery, so it’s a safe bet we’ll start learning more about Prometheus and Susan Williams as we start seeing more of Talia Al Ghul.
Do you think Susan Williams is hiding something? Let us know in the comments.
