The return of Arrow for Season 8 marks the beginning of the end for the show that started the now five-show Arrow-verse on The CW, but Mia and Connor's flash-forward journeys may be only just beginning. Joseph David-Jones, who has played Connor Hawke -- albeit in two very different forms -- since he debuted on Legends of Tomorrow back in 2016, weighed in on their relationship in Season 8, and what he had to say may surprise fans.
Is love in the air for Connor Hawke, adoptive son of John Diggle and Lyla Michaels, and Mia Smoak, daughter of Oliver Queen and Felicity Smoak, as seemed hinted by their mysterious history together in Season 7? Or will they have other things on their minds as two members of the new Team Arrow? When I asked Joseph David-Jones about Connor and Mia's dynamic in Season 8, he said this:
It's going to be a love-hate kind of thing. I feel like so much of this next season has been trying to figure out how to become heroes and who should take the lead and who should help guide this team into where they need to be. And that causes a good amount of contention between the two of them. JJ gets in between the two of them, but the whole time you feel the love there. And their relationship is a complicated one. So I can't wait for fans to see what comes of that.
Hey, that's some love, right? Star City in 2040 and beyond isn't an easy place to live even despite Team Arrow 2.0's victories at the end of Season 7, which were satisfying enough to Felicity that she felt able to leave her daughter behind to apparently join a very much not-dead Oliver somewhere far away. The kids of the members of Original Team Arrow have more on their minds than romance, even if that is something they'd want to pursue if conditions were purpose. Connor does have an evil brother in the mix thanks to JJ, after all!
Original Team Arrow had a clear leader, as it was Oliver's mission to begin with, and the rest joined his cause. Although Diggle and Felicity never blindly followed him, he was the Green Arrow, and they didn't even get code names for a few years. In the flash-forward Team Arrow, the four members -- Mia, Connor, William, and Zoe -- are more or less on equal ground, which means that somebody stepping up as leader could result in some friction. And then, of course, there's the issue of Connor's seemingly villainous adoptive brother, John Diggle Jr.
JJ was revealed to be part of the Deathstroke Gang, whose choice of name makes it pretty clear that they're not exactly heroes fighting the good fight for Star City. Played by Charlie Barnett of Chicago Fire fame, JJ and Connor have a complicated history of their own, and Joseph David-Jones revealed that he and Barnett put a lot of thought and work into crafting that dynamic.
Considering the Arrow spinoff that's in the works to focus on Mia Smoak and other key female characters from the parent series, the odds are pretty good that the Connor/Mia dynamic itself will continue beyond the end of Arrow. It should be interesting to see what goes down in the backdoor pilot that will air as one of the final ten episodes of Arrow.
Will this spinoff go the way of Supernatural's many spinoff attempts and never get off the ground, or does the Arrow-verse -- which is technically comprised almost entirely of spinoffs -- have what it takes to turn a flash-forward series into a hit? It would be a shame for the Arrow-verse to continue without an archer in the mix, even if it can't be Oliver Queen following Arrow's post-"Crisis on Infinite Earths" series finale.
See what's in store for Connor, Mia, and the rest with new episodes of Arrow airing Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET on The CW, following new episodes of The Flash in the fall TV lineup.
