If a show’s final moment says a lot about a series, then the Arrow series finale’s otherworldly closing scene could be translated as, “Meant to be.”
After being led by the Monitor in 2040 to reunite with Oliver, Felicity found herself transported to the afterlife, in the form of a familiar Queen Consolidated office. “Glad you could finally make it,” her husband sweetly greeted her. After a passionate and long-awaited kiss, Felicity joked that she thought the great beyond would look a little less like his old workplace.
“It’s my mom’s office. I wanted it to be where I first saw you…,” Oliver explained to Felicity, who contended that the location of that moment was actually seven floors down, in the IT department. “You sure?” Oliver replied. Cue a flashback of a flashback to when Oliver first spotted his future wife during a brief excursion from Hong Kong to Starling City in Season 3’s fourteenth episode, “The Return.”
“It’s a long story. Lucky for us, we have all the time in the world for me to tell it to you,” he added as the couple stood side by side, looking out the window.
Showrunner Beth Schwartz says the writers “always left it open at the end of Season 7 to have that final scene,” but the idea for Oliver and Felicity’s reunion was actually conceived of last June by Arrowverse EP Marc Guggenheim.
“I meditate every morning,” Guggenheim explained at a press screening, “and this one morning, I came out of the meditation with the entire scene in my head, like literally word-for-word exactly [what] you just watched it…. This has never happened to me before.”
After quickly jotting down the exchange, Guggenheim “very excitedly texted” Schwartz, he recounted. “I’m like, ‘I wrote the final scene! I gotta send it to you!’” And though the new, final moment “felt so right,” there was still a big, looming question: “Is Emily [Bett Rickards] coming back to be in it?” Guggenheim noted. “I’m like, ‘Well, now she really has to, because I really love this scene.”
In fact, the EPs had their hearts so set on that series-closing idea that “we didn’t even think of another ending,” Schwartz admitted. “We didn’t have a backup plan at all. We were just like, ‘Emily needs to do this,’ and luckily she did.”
Although that “Olicity” reunion marks the end of Arrow‘s run, there are still a multitude of spinoffs to which the show gave birth. So might Oliver and/or Felicity ever come back in some form? “The whole point of making him the Spectre was to give us story opportunities, because who knows what’s going to happen in the future?” Guggenheim said. “And the one thing I always say every time a character dies on any of these shows, it’s like, ‘We’ve got alternate realities. We’ve got time travel. We’ve got flashbacks.’ You name it, we have all these different devices. No one’s ever really gone.”
However… as much as Guggenheim “would love to see Stephen [Amell] back,” any such encore/cameo would depend on “how we brought him back and when,” so as not to dishonor the character’s sacrifice. “If we brought him back in, like, the seventh season premiere of Flash, it would probably diminish this event.”
Besides, “there’s also the opportunity to cut to him and Felicity in the afterlife, just hanging out. Living their best life,” Schwartz said with a laugh. Added Guggenheim: “There’s a contingent of fans who all they want is to see Oliver and Felicity at Bed Bath & Beyond…. I’m like, ‘Look, you know what, we gave them Beyond!’ One out of three! Not too bad.”
But wait, there’s more! Review the attached Burning Qs Answered gallery (click here for direct access) for even more behind-the-scenes intel from EP Marc Guggenheim and showrunner Beth Schwartz.
What did you think of the closing scene? Grade the series finale and final season below, then hit the comments with your thoughts!
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