The big mystery of “Arrow” Season 4 – who’s in the grave? – is about to be answered, and executive producers previewed
The episode, entitled “Eleven Fifty-Nine,” deals with Malcolm Merlyn (John Barrowman) seeking to break Damien Darhk (Neal McDonough) out of prison, as Laurel Lance (Katie Cassidy) contemplates a job offer that comes with potential consequences.
But the big moment of the episode certainly comes as it’s finally revealed who died in the season-opening flash forward. Then again, the consequences of dying on one of The CW’s DC comic-book-universe shows have changed, with the increasing presence of magical resurrection, Lazarus pits, time travel and parallel universes.
“We definitely recognize that when we kill off a character, it means something different now,” said Marc Guggenheim, an “Arrow” executive producer. “I’m not going to put a qualitative judgment on whether it’s more or less impactful, I’ll leave that up to the audience, but certainly, we acknowledge there is a difference.
“‘Arrow,’ much more than ‘Flash’ or ‘Legends,’ it traffics in death. We started off the series with the apparent death of Sara Lance and the actual death of Robert Queen and a hero who murdered people. For better or worse, death is part of the show… The concept of death on the show is evolving and changing, as we’ve already seen with Sara [Lance, played by Caity Lotz, now a series regular on ‘Legends of Tomorrow.’] Time travel is now on the table, parallel worlds is now on the table. As the show has evolved, so has death.”
That’s not to say death isn’t permanent. Executive producer Wendy Mericle reiterated this death will have repurcussions for the other characters going forward.
“There’s no question that it is going to be shocking,” she said. “It was a shocking thing for us to process and to write the aftermath. We really wanted to make sure that we did it in a way that was very honorable and gave us space to honor all the characters’ various reactions to it. The episodes we’ve written in the aftermath are devastating. They’re meant to be. We wanted to explore that and have everybody feel the impact of this loss.”
The episode also won’t just be a game changer in terms of the big death.
“There are a couple revelations in this episode,” Guggenheim said. “The death looms large, but there is a pretty seismic change for the Diggle-Andy relationship that we’ve been teasing.”
“Arrow” airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET on The CW.