Arrow is mere hours away from airing its milestone 100th episode on The CW, so the time is now to reflect back on the good, the bad, and the ugly of the first five seasons so far. The show has been enough of a hit with viewers that it successfully launched a small DC empire on The CW, but it hasn't been without its missteps. Executive producer Marc Guggenheim has a regret of his own from his time on Arrow. He explained what he wished he would have done differently, saying this:
I'd say probably my biggest regret is I wish we had allowed the Oliver-Felicity storyline in season 4 to unfold at a more natural pace. We had set these tentpoles at the beginning of the season, and we were a bit too rigorous on how we hit them. That was a case where the planning overtook the storytelling. We didn't do things as naturally and as elegantly as we should have.
The Oliver/Felicity relationship became an important part of Arrow back at the end of Season 2, when Oliver made a declaration of love to Felicity that was only kinda sorta maybe a ruse to capture Slade Wilson. The show played Felicity as the love interest from that point forward, even going so far in Season 3 as to have Oliver remember their one and only kiss when his life was flashing before his eyes. Then, the relationship hit warp speed in Season 4, and it came to a pretty ugly ending before the season was done. Considering how differently the Arrow team handled Olicity in Season 4 compared to previous seasons, Marc Guggeenheim's reveal to EW that he has second thoughts about the pacing of their relationship makes sense.
Oliver and Felicity went from living together to engaged in the span of nine episodes, then went from engaged to getting married ASAP four episodes later. By the time they broke up in Episode 15, they'd had an engagement party, booked a venue, and invited guests. Felicity even had her wedding dress. It was incredibly fast, and the show went so far in selling their trust and communication that it didn't really jive when Oliver decided to start lying about his secret kid in Central City.
The Oliver who was making grand gestures of openness and love to Felicity wasn't the same Oliver who would visit his secret kid a city away on the sly when his fiancee had recently ended up in a wheelchair. Season 4 might have worked better if Marc Guggenheim and Co. had either slowed their roll on the big Olicity story beats or changed the secret kid storyline in a major way. Hopefully Marc Guggenheim's regret about the pace of Olicity in Season 4 means that he'll do things differently for however long the show runs.
The Oliver/Felicity relationship likely won't get too much focus in the milestone 100th episode. The episode falls smack dab in the middle of the four-show DC TV crossover, and a lot of the action will reportedly take place in a "what might have been" scenario in Oliver's head where he never went through his five years of hell and is currently on the verge of marrying Laurel, who apparently got over the fact that he was a serial cheater. Ah, true love.
Tune in to The CW on Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET to see what's next for Oliver and Felicity on Arrow.
