Arrow Executive Producer Marc Guggenheim Talks “Underneath”

Judging from the votes that have come in so far for the GreenArrowTV Awards voting, fans had strong opinions about the 20th episode of this season of Arrow, titled “Underneath,” in which Oliver and Felicity were kept under the bunker. Fans on either side of the debate will be happy to know that Arrow Executive Producer Marc Guggenheim visited SiriusXM’s Superhero Insider from Entertainment Weekly today, and in it, he talked about how “Underneath” came about.

“It came about as the result of a confluence of two different events,” Guggenheim explained in the audio interview which you can find below. “We always knew from very early on in the season that we were going to get Oliver and Felicity into a circumstance whereby they would essentially deal with all their sh*t. We knew that we were going to place Felicity in a story where she would start to develop greater empathy for Oliver, and that that empathy would lead them to have, quite frankly, the adult conversation that they didn’t have in Season 4.”

“Around the same time, we were reaching the point in the season where we’re pretty far over budget and we’re starting to talk about bottle episodes to save some money, because we need to have a reservoir of dollars left to end the season in high style as it were, and I believe it was Brian Ford Sullivan who came up with this idea of Oliver and Felicity being trapped in the bunker,” he continued. “It really made the episode kind of like a play, because we wanted to put Oliver and Felicity together in a circumstance that forced them – or at the very least gave them the opportunity to deal with all their issues, and deal with them in an adult way. I don’t think they really did that in Season 4. At the end of Episode 415, Felicity just walks out the door, and they never really talk about all the things that broke them up in the first place.”

Guggenheim sounds pleased with where the episode fell in the ultimate scheme of things. “It’s always nice when you plan on doing something at the beginning of the season and then you get to the latter third of the season and you finally get a chance to turn these cards over that you always intended or hoped to turn over,” he said.

You can listen to the entire show below.