'It's going to be huge and significant,' says executive producer Wendy Mericle of how Team Arrow will deal with the shocking death.
- Apr 7, 2016
AceShowbiz - The answer to the long teased death on "Arrow" has been revealed, but you're not going to be happy with it. The leaked photos indeed told the truth and [SPOILER ALERT!] Laurel Lance (Katie Cassidy) was the one who met her end in the April 6 episode called "Eleven-Fifty-Nine". As Team Arrow tried to prevent Damien Darhk's escape from prison with the help of Malcolm Merlyn, the Black Canary took the bow from Oliver Queen's arrow which was used by Damien against her.
Justifying their decision to kill off Laurel, executive producer Marc Guggenheim says, "We started off this year with the promise of a death. When we sort of worked our way through our various different creative choices, we realized that the thing that will give us the most 'pop' going into the end of the season and next season, unfortunately, would be Laurel."
Guggenheim insists Laurel's death had nothing to do with the show's romantic pairing of Oliver and Felicity. In the comic books, Oliver and Laurel end up together. "With respect to that last point, we felt like we had told the Oliver/Laurel love story in season 1, and we had no intention of getting them back together. We never felt like we had to kill off Laurel to put an end to that story," he claims.
Star Katie Cassidy herself who plays Laurel agrees that it's time for her character's storyline to end. "It made sense to me creatively," she says. "Laurel's story has come to an end in the Arrow-verse."
On how Oliver and friends will deal with Laurel's death, EP Wendy Mericle chimes in, "It's going to be huge and significant. ...The episodes that we've written in the aftermath are devastating and they're meant to be. That's what we wanted. We wanted to explore that and to really have everybody feel the impact of this loss, because it is significant."
But in Arrow-verse, death doesn't mean it's the last time we saw Laurel. "...we now live in a universe where there's resurrection, parallel earths, time travel, flashbacks - we have all these different ways of keeping Katie in the Arrow-verse family," Guggenheim teases. Cassidy is already set to appear in the next episode which will feature a lot of flashbacks and she will appear as Earth-2's Laurel a.k.a. Black Siren on "The Flash".
But Guggenheim assures us that Laurel's really dead. "No," Guggenheim says when asked if Oliver helped fake her death. "We've done a fake death before. That's the thing, we're always trying to figure out, 'What's a way to do this?' That fake-out where she was okay and then she wasn't was our attempt: How do we do a death that we haven't done before? [It's a] creative challenge, the deeper you get into your story. It's the nature of having a long-running show that deals as a major component of it with death."
"Arrow" will take a break and return with a new episode Wednesday, April 27 at 8/7c on The CW.
