Arrow season 4, episode 18, “Eleven-Fifty-Nine,” revealed who is in the grave.
Warning: This article contains major spoilers from Arrow season 4, episode 18, “Eleven-Fifty-Nine.” Do not read on if you haven’t seen the episode.
So, that happened.
Unfortunately, paparazzi pictures spoiled the identity of the person in the grave several weeks ago. However, knowing that Laurel was in the grave didn’t make it any easier to watch her be stabbed, apparently saved and then go into cardiac arrest before dying. The death was not only brutal, it was also cruel.
And completely unnecessary.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, the Arrow writers didn’t want to kill Laurel in the first place, but they had to pay off the grave teaser in the premiere — a teaser they wrote without knowing who would be in the grave. Thus, Laurel’s death was nothing more than the payoff of an ill-conceived gimmick.
Moreover, Laurel was killed in a way that has become all too familiar on Arrow in recent seasons: fridging. Almost a year ago to the day, I wrote about my frustration with the show killing women to further the plots of men. And now we get yet another female character — this one the adaptation of an iconic comic book character — for the sake of causing manpain.
How do we know this? Oh, because Damien Darhk says so before he stabs her. He threatened to kill Laurel if Lance were to betray him, and he tells Laurel to send her father a message before stabbing her. It’s not because Laurel was about to become the DA or because she was prosecuting his case. No, it was all about Lance’s — and Oliver’s — pain.
And that isn’t good enough.
True, Laurel gets an incredible scene with Oliver just before her death. Katie Cassidy knocks it out of the park as she calls Oliver the love of her life, though she knows she isn’t his. (Though Tommy seemed like the love of her life to me, so I can only assume it was meant as a nod to their relationship in the comics.)
But Laurel’s arc was incomplete. She was just coming into her own as the Black Canary. After losing Tommy, Laurel spent a season spiraling in her grief before losing her sister and taking up the mantle of Black Canary in her honor. We saw in her fight with League of Assassins mooks in the bunker that she’d become a truly formidable fighter. And even if she were to quit being a vigilante to become the DA, she would remain a hero helping the city. Not all heroes have to wear masks, after all.
But that incredible arc of climbing up from rock bottom was still ongoing. Losing Laurel now cuts that short — and undercuts the power of her story. And that’s both disappointing and frustrating for viewers invested in the character. Moira’s death in season 2, while for the sake of causing pain to her children, came at a point that the character’s arc had come full circle. Sara’s didn’t, but eventually she was resurrected and is working through her own arc on Legends of Tomorrow.
However, the writers have said that this death will stick (though they also say “Dead is not goodbye”). Nyssa destroyed the Lazarus Pit that raised Sara, leaving the team without a way to bring her back. The writers have also said, “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.”
With the recent fracturing of the OG Team Arrow, it seems likely this death will bring them back together once again, as we saw them reunited in the hospital. But why did it need to come to that? The dynamic between Oliver, Diggle, and Felicity was really what made the show work in its early seasons, and the fact that the group had fractured to the point it has was the result of manufactured drama that few fans seemed to enjoy. This “resolution” doesn’t seem likely to be something fans will enjoy either.
Two wrongs don’t make a right, but that seems to be the theme of the second half of Arrow season 4. And that’s too bad, because I was really enjoying the first half of the season.
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