Warning! This post contains potential spoilers for Arrow Season 6
Five years ago Oliver Queen was stranded on an island, but don't let that headline fool you, he wasn't actually a passenger on Oceanic Flight 815 this whole time. Lost will affect the Arrow Season 6 premiere in an unexpected way though thanks to fan of the ABC series and the lead actor on Arrow: Stephen Amell. Amell shared the details during a roundtable at San Diego Comic-Con:
We flash back in 601 to the immediate aftermath of the explosion. I am all over the writers in a good way, having watched Lost twice and having so many questions still. I want to make sure that we properly unpack the aftermath of the explosion. How did it affect people. Who lived. Who died. What happened to them. We need to make the aftermath of that explosion the critical fulcrum point of Season 6, otherwise what was the point of Chase blowing up the island?
This is good news for fans of Arrow who might've been worried the Lian Yu incident would be a mystery throughout all of Season 6, as it would appear that Stephen Amell kept on the writers to resolve quite a bit of it if not all during the premiere episode. That's no guarantee this is 100% the case, but the anti-Lost analogy seems to indicate this isn't going to be a case where the information slowly rolls out over the course of the entire season. Either that, or it's a very sneaky way to indicate the explosion wasn't actually caused by Adrian Chase, but rather an electromagnetic disruption after someone failed to enter a code on a computer.
It's also good to know that the aftermath of Arrow's Season 5 finale is substantial enough that it will serve as the central plot to Season 6. With a few cast members already confirmed as returning and showrunners indicating fans shouldn't obsess about the death of characters, it almost sounded like the explosion aftermath was going to be less intense than it looked. Stephen Amell's words indicate that whatever is discovered by Oliver in the premiere is, at the very least, important enough that it remains a factor throughout the entire season.
Stephen Amell is promising so many answers in the premiere that one has to wonder how much of the Season 6 opener will be a flashback. It seems as though it would be very difficult to answer all the Lost level type questions one has following the Lian Yu explosion in the typical time allotted to flashbacks, so hopefully, a little more time will be spent in the past than the present. With a whole season to focus on the present day and the healing period, and the second episode not featuring flashbacks, it makes sense if the Arrow writers want to spend a bit more time fleshing out exactly what happened.
Arrow is set to return for Season 6 Thursday, October 12th at 9 p.m. ET on The CW. For more Arrow related SDCC scoops regarding Season 6, check out how the "big bad," this year might be way different than in the past, or how this year could be the Arrow-verse's darkest yet. For more on summer programming and all the hottest shows of the summer new and returning check out our summer premiere guide.
