Arrow: Marc Guggenheim Talks Thea’s Season 5 Absence & The Character’s Future

ComicBook.com today posted an interview with Arrow Executive Producer Marc Guggenheim where he discussed the future of Willa Holland’s Thea Queen — whether or not she survives the explosion on Lian Yu from last season’s finale. He also talked about the notion that was widely discussed among Arrow fans last year, that the latter half of the season, especially, had a notable lack of Oliver Queen’s sister in it.

“We love Willa, we love Thea the character and we particularly love Thea’s relationship with Oliver,” Guggenheim told the site. “That said, Willa came to us at the end of season four and she, very honestly, expressed a desire to cut back how many episodes a season she was doing. She’s a member of our family, and we wanted to honor that request. That’s what happens when you have a show that goes over a hundred episodes, people start to say, ‘hey, I would like to pull back,’ some people don’t want to renew their contract. There’s a whole host of different things that start to come into play and you work that into the story telling.”

And, yes, Willa Holland is a part of Arrow Season 6.”All I’ll say really, and you can interpret this however you want, is Willa is back on the show and we are doing flashbacks from people’s perspective that does not always include Oliver’s,” Guggenheim said. “I’ll let you extrapolate from that what you will.”

Could this be how we’ll see Roy in Season 6 — in a Thea/Roy flashback?

Arrow Season 6 premieres this week, October 12 on The CW. You can see pictures from the season premiere here.

Read ComicBook’s original interview piece here.