Wendy Mericle Talks About The Aftermath Of [SPOILER]’s Death

As we saw in “Eleven-Fifty-Nine,” Laurel Lance (Katie Cassidy) is dead. What will this mean for the rest of the team?

“It’s going to be huge and significant, and in terms of our process for making the decision, you can judge the impact by how important Laurel was to the universe we’ve created,” Executive Producer Wendy Mericle said earlier this week about tonight’s game-changer. “There is no question that it is going to be shocking, and it was a shocking thing for us to process, and to write the aftermath… we really wanted to make sure that we did it in a way that was very honorable, and that it gave us space to honor all of the characters’ various reactions to it. I will say that the episodes that we’ve written in the aftermath, they’re devastating, and they’re meant to be. That’s what we wanted. We wanted to explore that, and to really have everybody feel the impact of this loss, because it is significant, and we do feel like it is a game-changer, in a very sad way, in that we’re losing a beloved character, but big moves like that will open up new storytelling avenues and will force our characters to re-think their decisions, and to re-think their objectives. Death is a reality, and I think with the Lazarus Pit and the possibility of coming back, it’s easy in some ways to forget that our characters are vigilantes. They’re out on the street. They’re doing really dangerous things. And what this does, is it really brings that reality back in a very kind of rude and brutal way. It’s good for the audience to be reminded of that, and for our characters as well.”

At the CW-hosted Q&A, Mericle was also asked how this would specifically affect Felicity. “I can tell you this: It will definitely have a huge impact on her character, and that if you think about Felicity and what she would do in the wake of something like this, I leave you to draw your conclusions, you’ll find out in 19, but everyone is going to be compelled to try to fix this, and figure out what happened, and get revenge on the people who did it,” Mericle says.

Read more coverage of this big Arrow episode here.