Posted in: Movies, TV | Tagged: arrow, cw, Emily Bett Rickards, entertainment, Felicity Smoak, marc guggenheim, television

Marc Guggenheim On Dark Felicity And What Made It Happen

With the mid-season finale of Arrow, tragedy struck Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards) as the season's big bad Prometheus tricked Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) into killed Billy Malone (Tyler Ritter). Now, it's a bad day when your old boyfriend kills your new one… but when someone mysterious figure makes it happen… you got to go and get revenge right? That's just the way it is. And in this case, Felicity is going to need some allies… unexpected allies. Executive producer Marc Guggenheim spoke to Collider about Felicity's journey through the rest of the season.

The first think you'd think of would be Felicity's father, the Calculator (Tom Amandes), but that's not where they're going:

We talked about that. We love Tom Amandes and we love that character, but there was a real appetite on my part and Wendy [Mericle]'s part — we had done her dad last year and we'd definitely love to bring him back and we'd love to bring back Charlotte as Donna, but we were kind of craving new characters. We were craving a new story, something we haven't done before.

And this season's theme has been about legacy, so…

As with all things Arrow, it's not initially what you think it is and it will ultimately relate to the overall season theme of legacy, but in this case something very specific to Felicity.

But for anyone worried that we're going to lose what makes Felicity special…

This is something I was talking to the writers about in the writers' room — Felicity is a wonderful character because she brings some light into the show. So it's a darker — it's an edgier story for Felicity, but at the same time, it's still Felicity. You want to keep the character.

Felicity has been in a much darker world for a lot of years now and has been the shinning light through all of it. Eventually, some of that darkness has to get on her. Between Billy, Havenrock, and everything else… it's time for her to turn a bit to the dark side.

It's the sum of a bunch of stuff, and Billy was sort of the final straw. It's also the sum of the fact that Felicity's been living in this darker world for the last four-plus years now and one of the things we're exploring is how much what Oliver and Diggle and Roy and Laurel have been doing as vigilantes affected her and affected her way of thinking about things.

Arrow returns January 25th.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!