Arrow Shocker: EP Marc Guggenheim On Why It Happened

[Beware, spoilers for the Season 3 premiere of Arrow, titled “The Calm,” are discussed within.]

Most of the Arrow audience thought they knew what to expect going into Season 3… and then it was all turned on its ear, when Sara Lance, played by Caity Lotz, was shot with arrows by an unknown assailant. Arrow’s first Canary doesn’t seem to have cheated death like she did when she went down with the Queen’s Gambit… this time it seems permanent.

We spoke with Marc Guggenheim at a press Q&A last week where he discussed how and why this happened.

“Basically, every season, we spend what really should be our hiatus and what really should be me relaxing on a beach planning out the whole season. It’s what we did in Season 1. It’s what we did in Season 2. We did the same process in Season 3,” Guggenheim said. “We just started off talking about ‘what’s the season about?’ I’ve spoken at length, at this point, about that it’s about identity. We talked about what Oliver’s journey for the year is going be. We talked about what all the other characters’ journeys for the year would be. Just in the course of those story conversations, we had this notion of starting the year off in a way that we typically end the year. It was just part and parcel of our plan for the year ever since we started. It was one of the first ideas that we kicked around,” he told us.

“It was hard. Every time we kill off a character on the show, it’s always incredibly hard. We’re not Game of Thrones. We’re not Sons of Anarchy. It’s really, really, really difficult. We’re very lucky. I really mean this. Our cast and our guest cast are always wonderful people. We’ve been very lucky. We don’t screen people for their personality, but we have this great group and a really wonderfully welcoming cast, and Caity Lotz completely fit into that family. So it’s always really hard to kill of someone who you just really enjoy working with and you really love writing for and love seeing on the screen. But as with Tommy’s death, as with Moira’s death, the story implications for this development are so far-reaching for the show and affect all of the characters. We always call it it’s the terrible story math. It kicks off, obviously, a mystery that will drive us for at least the first half of the year. It will set Laurel on a trajectory that she’s never had before on the show. It will create all these other complications and dynamics that I can’t talk about because it would spoil stuff. It buys us a lot of story, and it speaks to all the things that we wanted to do this year in terms of Laurel’s character, in terms of Oliver’s character, in terms of Felicity’s character. It’s always a hard thing to do, but it is really the engine that’s driving the whole third season,” Guggenheim explained.

Sara’s death will definitely affect how Laurel and Oliver interact, and probably not necessarily in the ways that one would expect. “I think Sara’s death probably pulls them closer together than pulls them apart,” Guggenheim said. “That’s not to say there’s not significant moments of conflict between them also. That’s one of the reasons we killed Sara off: the amount of story and richness that we get out of it. There’s a scene in episode 2 where they’re going at it and can’t stand each other. And there’s also a scene in episode 2 where they’re the closest they’ve ever been. And that’s all in the same episode. And it doesn’t feel schizophrenic, it doesn’t feel inconsistent. Every moment feels earned, because of the emotional roller coaster these people are on.” The death of Sara might also change Diggle’s decisions as far as being part of the team goes. “In episode 2, let’s say the circumstances of Sara’s death change up a lot of things for all of our characters,” Guggenheim revealed. There will also be some questions among the characters: For example, will Quentin be told? Could he handle losing his daughter a second time?

As far as relationships go, even before Sara’s death, don’t hold a funeral for “Olicity” yet. “It’s also something we’re going to be dealing with over the course of the season. The end of that hospital scene didn’t just take Oliver and Felicity and put them back in a box. The repercussions of that scene and that storyline in episode 1, that’s going to follow them over the course of season 3. It’s not over. We didn’t just hit pause or reset on their relationship. This is just a development in an ongoing relationship,” Marc promised.

Finally… what was that news about Caity Lotz signing a contract for a number of episodes in Season 2? Guggenheim insists he was not lying. “You’re going to see her in the next episode, and then you’re going to see her in at least a third episode. And the truth is we have stories that involve Caity Lotz. One of the beautiful parts of the show is we do flashbacks. We still want to tell the story of what happened when Sara washed up on the shores of Lian Yu, after the events of 223, the sinking of The Amazo, and how she met Nyssa and how she joined the League of Assassins. There’s still a lot of story left to be told with Sara. We did make a contract with Caity for three episodes. You certainly haven’t seen the last of her,” he said. Sara’s not the only one we haven’t seen the last of: Her death will bring Nyssa back to town — look for Katrina Law in the fourth episode of the new season.

Come talk about the Arrow season premiere on our forum! And if you’re looking for content related to next week’s show, appropriately titled “Sara,” come back to the GreenArrowTV home page, where we should be posting a trailer soon, if we haven’t already!