Spoiler alert for anyone who hasn't yet seen Arrow's midseason finale.
Oliver Queen hasn't had the most normal life on Arrow in recent weeks. Dealing with a mysterious villain from the past is never easy, especially when there are also problems like mind-warping aliens to take care of. Tonight's midseason finale, "What We Leave Behind," took an initial dark turn when Oliver unwittingly killed Felicity's boyfriend, but the biggest kicker of them all came in the final seconds, when our mayoral hero returned to the Arrow Cave and found someone waiting for him. Someone that looked and sounded an awful lot like Laurel Lance. Here's what Stephen Amell had to say about it post-episode.
Is Laurel really alive? Well, I guess we'll have to tune in...Obviously, people don't just come back from the dead, so there has to be some sort of vetting process to make sure it actually is Laurel, because the group has seen some peculiar things. But we delve into that when we come back in the new year.
Dammit, man, what are you telling us?!? One of the more polarizing characters in the Arrow-verse, Laura Lance was killed off in Season 4's "Eleven-Fifty-Nine" by Damien Dahrk, and it was said at the time that she was for reals dead and the show wouldn't be using its usual Lazarus Pit tricks to bring her back. Since that time, though, we've seen Katie Cassidy return as the Laurel Lance doppelgänger from Earth-2 who went by the villainous moniker Black Siren, and the actress also returned for Arrow's 100th episode last week, which was seemingly a way to give Oliver a full sense of closure over some of the bigger tragedies of his life. Now she's back again, so what gives?
Immediately following the midseason finale's ending, Stephen Amell started answering fan questions on Facebook Live, which is where he shared the thoughts seen above. All things considered, especially Amell's words, it would seem to me that whoever Oliver runs into in the bunker isn't the real Laurel Lance, since they'll be doing whatever is necessary to vet her honesty. But what is she, then? Not likely an alien or anything, but perhaps a shapeshifting metahuman? Or maybe she isn't real at all and is a lingering effect inside his head from his stay on The Dominators' ship.
Knowing how these shows work, it's possible the answer to Laurel's purported existence in the here and now won't come from Arrow at all, but one of the other shows in the DC TV universe. Last week's episode of Legends of Tomorrow was responsible for giving Supergirl the option to crossover at any point, and it seemingly introduced the concept of the DEO to Earth-1's government. So what if, in tomorrow night'sLegends midseason finale, Sara Lance does something to Damien Darhk or Reverse-Flash that - stop me if you've heard this one before - messes with the timeline and thus takes Laurel's death out of the equation completely? It's hardly an impossibility at this point.
It's impossible to tell how the Arrow-verse will apply an explanation to this turn of events, but you can bet we'll be digging into theories and speculations while waiting for the show's return. Arrow is gone for its midseason hiatus, but it will return to The CW on Wednesday, January 25, 2017. In the meantime, you can check out everything else coming to the small screen with our midseason premiere schedule.
