Arrow spoilers ahead (Seasons 2, 3)!
Oliver Queen has a child, that much we know. But Oliver doesn’t. This plot twist was introduced in the second season of Arrow and barely explored, let alone resolved. It was revisited briefly in an episode of The Flash, and promptly dropped again. When is Oliver going to find out that he has a child? That question came up during the press roundtables with Stephen Amell at Comic-Con in San Diego. From the sound of it, Stephen Amell thinks Oliver’s offspring is a story that deserves more attention.
Stephen Amell noted that he’s very interested to see how Oliver interacts with his child, being a dad himself, but from the sound of it, it’s all about timing in terms of when that meeting will actually take place…
Obviously, it would be a different experience than what I’ve experienced, but I think that that story line deserves further attention. One of the big tenets of Greg Berlanti, is you don’t introduce something to the audience, you don’t tease it, if you’re not going to follow through with it in some way, shape, or form. So, I think it’s a safe bet that Oliver will find out about his child at some point.
Earlier in the discussion with Amell, he mentioned that he’d read the scripts for three episodes of Season 4. From what he’s saying in the quote above, it doesn’t sound like Oliver’s child factors into the introduction to the season, or he’s just being really tight-lipped about it, which I’m less inclined to believe in this case. But it’s possible the arc will be explored at some point later in Season 4, especially knowing that there’s a good chance Oliver will be back in Central City by December, if not sooner.
this is a story that’ll need some room to develop. It’s just a matter of when and how that’ll fit into the series, and that may or may not be in the relative near future. In the meantime, it’s just hanging out there like one big loose end.
We learned that Oliver was a father in “Seeing Red,” an episode in the second season, wherein Oliver’s mother quietly paid the pregnant young woman off to lie to Oliver about losing the baby and then depart Starling and return to Central City. We saw the unnamed woman again at Jitters in Central City when Oliver was visiting for the big crossover. They bumped into each other, exchanged a few awkward words, then Oliver left, after which the woman spoke to her child on the phone.
From what executive producer Marc Guggenheim told TVLine last year, it sounds like they have big ideas for what they want to do with this story…
We also need to have that moment happen in the right context. So is it Year 3, is it Year 10…? I don’t know. We’ve put it out there and we’ve got some cool ideas about where to go with it, should we do it, but we haven’t committed to actually doing it or even when to do it.
It's worth noting that this quote comes from an article that was posted in August 2014, months before Oliver ran into the mother of his child in "Flash vs. Arrow," so it seems they did decide to pursue the topic, which is suggests that they do plan to address the subject at some point (otherwise why tease it?). Amell's update on the subject implies that that’s still the case, at least for now.
Arrow is set to premiere Season 4 on Wednesday, October 7 at 8:00 p.m. on The CW.
