Interview: EP Andrew Kreisberg Previews Arrow’s “Unthinkable” Season Finale

The second season of Arrow ends this Wednesday night (May 14) with a big battle, as it’s Team Arrow and their many allies up against Slade Wilson and his army of Deathstrokes. The episode is called “Unthinkable,” and we’re expecting action even bigger than last week’s episode (and that’s saying something) and stakes even higher than last year’s finale (and that’s also saying something).

To promote the episode, we spoke with Arrow Executive Producer Andrew Kreisberg and asked some questions that [hopefully] we all wanted answered. Enjoy:

GREENARROWTV’s CRAIG BYRNE: You mentioned on Twitter that the theme of the season finale is “embracing your destiny.” Can you talk about that, and does that phrase refer to more than just Oliver?

ANDREW KREISBERG: It refers to just about everybody in the show. Everyone is really faced with a choice about who they’re going to be, and for Oliver, all season long, it’s been a question of “am I a hero or am I a killer?” For Thea, she’s certainly presented with two paths before her. “Am I Oliver’s sister, or am I Malcolm’s daughter?” Sara, “Am I the Black Canary, or am I one of Ra’s al Ghul’s minions?” Everyone is faced with this choice in this giant, epic battle, and while the show is probably as big as anything we’ve ever done in terms of scale, in terms of action, and in terms of visual effects, it also has these small little moments that are just pure emotion of the people that hopefully the audience have come to really care about over the course of these past two seasons, as they make these fateful decisions about which way their lives are going to go.

What’s happening for Felicity in the finale, and can you also say what’s happening with Laurel?

Felicity is front and center in the battle to take down Slade. I think she really proves in this episode why the audience loves her so much. She does one of the most brave things she’s ever done in the course of the series, and certainly one of the bravest things we’ve ever seen anybody do in the course of the series. There are a couple of “big Olicity moments” that I think fans are really going to appreciate.

At the same time, Laurel has an emotional scene in here that I think – for the people who are fans of Laurel – they’re going to get their money’s worth in this finale. It really is a finale of people embracing their destiny, and really making big and conscious choices of who they want to be, and what they’re willing to do for Oliver, and what they’re willing to do to save the city. It’s really exciting to have gotten to this point in the series, because so many of the things we’re doing in this last episode are things that we talked about doing back when we had the pilot. Greg, Marc, and I, and Geoff Johns, had conversations about “hey, wouldn’t it be great if one day we did this?” And we’re finally at “one day,” and this stuff is finally happening.

It’s not to say that we haven’t had an amazing time along the way; it’s just success has really allowed us to get to these totally fun places with these characters, and we’re just so thrilled that the audience has responded.

Will the finale explain why the Mirakuru didn’t heal Slade Wilson’s eye?

No. That was actually something that got cut from an earlier episode, where we explained that was why Ivo was interested in people’s eyes, because it was the one part of the body that didn’t regenerate. But, unfortunately that ended up on the cutting room floor.

There’s been a lot of effort to cure Roy, even though he has done some horrible things while on Mirakuru. If Slade were to be cured, could be he redeemable himself or is he too far gone?

I think that’s one of the interesting things that the finale explores. Slade actually has a line in the finale where he says “you think I hate you because of the Mirakuru?” Yes, the Mirakuru obviously unhinged him, and yes, it allowed him to so subsume his moral center, that he was willing to essentially destroy the city just to make Oliver suffer. But at the end of the day, I think there are some very human emotions, and I think when people lose someone that they love, they’re looking for somebody to blame, and unfortunately, all of his rage and anger went right on to Oliver.

We always try to base everything in emotion, and we never wanted it to be the situation where if Slade could just get the cure, he would suddenly go “Oh! You know what? I realize you were presented with a terrible situation, and it wasn’t really your fault, and let’s go get a drink.” I think that’s one of the sad realizations for Oliver in the finale, that he’s lamented all these years, “if I had just cured him, none of this would have happened,” but the truth of the matter is, that rage that was inside Slade was not entirely sci-fi evil juice-generated.

Because this interview is long we’ve split it into two pages. Navigate below for more… the Pages navigation is right below the share buttons, we’d move it up higher if we knew how to: