Arrow season 4, episode 18, “Eleven-Fifty-Nine,” saw the death of a core member of Team Arrow. The producers and actors respond.
Warning: This story contains major spoilers from Arrow season 4, episode 18, “Eleven-Fifty-Nine.” Do not read on unless you’ve seen the episode.
Since we saw the flash-forward in the season premiere teasing the death of a character close to both Oliver and Barry, fans have been speculating about who we’d be losing. And “Eleven-Fifty-Nine” paid that promise off. It was, in fact, Katie Cassidy’s Laurel Lance, aka the Black Canary, who died as a result of a confrontation with Damien Darhk. Though she made it through surgery after being stabbed and shared a moment with Team Arrow, she eventually coded — before her father could arrive on scene. (Read my thoughts on that here.)
“We started off this year with a promise of a death and when we worked our way through our various creative choices, we realized that the thing that will give us the most pop going into the end of the season, going into next season, unfortunately would be Laurel,” executive producer Marc Guggenheim said at a screening.
Laurel has been a controversial character among fans, as her arc has been full of ups and downs. “We knew that it would enrage a lot of people,” Guggenheim said of Laurel’s death. However, fan reaction was not a deciding factor in Laurel’s fate.
“We’re not immune to the [fans rooting for Oliver and Laurel] and we’re not blind to it. We knew people would think, in the season where Oliver and Felicity get engaged and Laurel dies, that’s clearly making a choice about who’s going to end up with who. We told the Laurel/Oliver romance story in season 1. We never really thought about going back to it. [Fans rooting for them] was not an element or a factor for us.”
While the writers have immense respect for the comic book source material, “at the same time, we’ve always made no bones about the fact that we are telling our own version of the Green Arrow mythos,” Guggenheim said. “But it made the most creative sense for us going forward despite the fact that we love Katie. Every time we’ve killed off a character on the show, it’s really been for the effect on all the characters left behind.”
Moreover, don’t expect Laurel to be revived the way her sister was, via the Lazarus Pit. “We made a creative choice and we’re sticking to it,” Guggenheim said. “We make the creative choices we feel benefit the show as a whole and the story we’re telling overall.”
However, this will not be the last we see of Katie Cassidy or Laurel Lance as “we now live in a world and universe where there is resurrection, parallel earths, time travel and flashbacks” with the three shows in the Arrow-verse. The next episode will heavily feature Laurel-centric flashbacks. Plus, Cassidy will appear “on an episode of Flash playing the Earth-2 version of Laurel Lance. Katie is reprising her role as Laurel of Earth-1 to be in Vixen season 2. Death does not mean goodbye on any of these shows.”
As for the actress herself, Cassidy was nothing but gracious in talking about her character’s end. “Since season 2 up until now, Laurel has had a truly amazing journey and they’ve written so well for me,” she said. “I’ve had such an incredible arc so it made sense to me, creatively, that we’ve told Laurel’s story. It has come to an end in the Arrow-verse. I think the shock value is good. It’s such a jolt and such a turn in the story that it gives them so much more to do and places to go. Otherwise I feel like shows can get stale.”
She adds, “I’m always happy to come play with them if they time-travel or what not. To me, Laurel was always such a good person and had such a good heart and was a fighter. For her to be remembered, I think her being remembered that way is definitely important to me.”
Paul Blackthorne, who plays Quentin Lance, said Laurel’s death “is just devastating for Lance because this is not the one that was ever supposed to happen. I was almost as devastated as Lance with the news, because Katie and I have had such an amazing working relationship. It really is hard to accept that I’m going to have to go into work without this fabulous lady.
“In terms of Quentin, he’s going to have to pick up the pieces and not pick up a bottle and reconcile what’s left in his life. He’s got his Arrow family and that will have to be where he finds his anchor now from here on in without his beautiful daughter.”
As for Sara, she “will find out in Legends about what happened with Laurel and I think we give it its due,” Guggenheim said. “We’ve always said on Legends we were not going to shy away from this development as far as Sara’s character is concerned. Paul was very gracious to lend his time to Legends to really allow us to explore that.”
As for the promise that Laurel asked Oliver to make off-screen, we’ll find out what it was in season 5.