In 2020, Arrow concluded its run on The CW, although characters like Oliver Queen and John Diggle would later resurface in The Flash and other corners of the Arrowverse. Still, with nearly half a decade having passed since the eight-season saga following Stephen Amell’s Green Arrow ended, Marc Guggenheim has opened up about aspects of the show that didn’t turn out the way he hoped. Specifically, he talked about what would have prevented Katie Cassidy’s Laurel Lance from being killed off, as well as why Arrow Season 4, i.e. the season in which she met her demise, is his “least favorite” of the bunch.
Marc Guggenheim Regrets Arrow Killing Off Laurel Lance
Although Katie Cassidy appeared in every season of Arrow and resumed being a series regular in Season 6 to continue playing Earth-2’s Laurel Lance, the Earth-1 Laurel, who’d been around since the show began in 2012, was mortally stabbed by Damien Darhk in “Eleven-Fifty-Nine.” While discussing the drastically different kinds of fan reactions that Arrow received in comparison to fellow Arrowverse series Legends of Tomorrow, Marc Guggenheim said during his appearance on The Showrunner Whisperer that had he known the Emerald Archer’s show would have gone on as long as he did, Earth-1 Laurel would have stuck around, explaining:
The death of Laurel, honestly, it wasn’t my call… The thing that would have changed Laurel’s fate honestly wasn’t going to be Twitter. What would have changed it was if we had known that we were going to go for four more years. Had we known that the show was only reaching its midpoint, I don’t think Laurel would have been killed off. But at the time, we always saw the show as a five-year show. It didn’t really occur to us that it was going to go beyond that. So I think that if we’re talking about hindsight being 20/20, I think that’s a greater factor
Laurel’s death was met with a lot of backlash from fans in 2016, though at the time, Marc Guggenheim defended the decision. But like he said, that was back when Arrow was only expected to run for five seasons, and it ended up going for an additional three. It’s fortunate Katie Cassidy was able to keep participating in Arrow, and I presume she welcomed the opportunity to play a Laurel with a much different personality. Still, I can’t help wondering what might have happened with Earth-1 Laurel had she survived the events of Season 4.
Marc Guggenheim Doesn’t Like Arrow Season 4’s Tone
Marc Guggenheim’s regret over what happened to Earth-1 Laurel are just part of his larger issues with Arrow Season 4. As he acknowledged in the below quote, going with a more lighthearted tone following three seasons of dark storytelling wasn’t a good call:
Season 4 is probably my least favorite of all the seasons, in large part because there were things that, in hindsight, just didn’t work, and things we shouldn’t have necessarily tried. I think there are some incredibly strong episodes in Season 4, don’t get me wrong. There are some episodes that I think are really great episodes of Arrow. But overall, as a season, I think the idea to try a lighter tone, it wasn’t true to the show. We were going for a lighter tone because in the first three seasons, it’d been so dark. And bear in mind, a lighter tone for Arrow is very different from a lighter tone for most shows. We still ended the midseason finale with Oliver and Felicity being attacked, and Felicity being paralyzed. I do wish we had approached that whole storyline very differently.
Guggenheim added that he wished he and the Arrow writing team had approached Season 4’s storyline differently, and that they’d “stuck to the game plan too rigidly in a lot of places.” So he’d go back and change things if he could, though he then shared why he wouldn’t touch the Season 4 finale, titled “Schism”:
I will say I love the season finale of Season 4. We wanted to do an epic battle with a lot of extras, that felt like the end of The Dark Knight Rises, and I feel like we succeeded in that. There’s a lot of groundwork that’s done to introduce The Atom and Ray Palmer that I think worked extremely well. Like I said, there are individual episodes that I liked; the finale, again, being a good example. But when you do 8 seasons of television, not every season’s going to be perfect.
If you’re interested in revisiting Arrow, it can be streamed with a Netflix subscription among plenty of other DC movies and TV shows on that platform. Otherwise, make sure you have a Max subscription, as that’s where the majority of upcoming DC TV shows will be going.