Yes, The ‘Arrow’ Season 5 Finale Will Return to THAT Famous Scene

Apart from its 100th episode, Arrow Season 5 promises to bring fans to another major milestone for the series; completing the five-year flashback cycle that defined the early days. As such, we can cross one scene off the Season 5 finale next year, as a scene from the pilot will have Oliver in tatters once again.

TVLine updated executive producer Marc Guggenheim’s past claims that the series finale would naturally end on Oliver spotting the boat that takes him off Lian Yu, thus completing the pilot and beginning Oliver’s vigilante crusade all over again. As you might have guessed, that claim was made with Season 5 as a far-off goal, and Guggenheim now confirms the scene won’t be arbitrarily pushed to a distant final season:

It was really just a hope at that point [in 2012] that the show would run five years, and we always thought that we would intercut the final moment of the series with the first moment of the series, that it would form one big Moebius strip. There’s still a part of me that wishes we could do that. But I wouldn’t want to artificially extend the flashbacks [beyond five seasons], and I also wouldn’t want to artificially cut the show short. It would’ve been a beautifully elegant thing, and Five Years Ago Me would’ve loved it. But things change, and I do think it’ll make the Season 5 finale pretty awesome.

That said Season 5 will still attempt to keep us on edge for the finale, as Guggenheim teased “At the same time, we always leave ourselves room to be like, ‘…and throw this cliffhanger in, throw that twist in.’ Usually the craziest ideas on this show tend to be the ones that the ideas sort of linger, and we never really quite set on them.” There’s also still the matter of exactly what brings Oliver back to Lian Yu, given his current feud with Konstantin Kovar (Dolph Lundgren) in Russia.

In the meantime, Season 5 is likely to change direction by next week’s winter finale, “What We Leave Behind,” the trailer for which you can find below.

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