Arrow spoilers are below for those not caught up.
There are only a few episodes left in Season 4 of Arrow, and Team Arrow’s prospects aren’t looking too great. Damien Darhk has the world on the verge of a nuclear apocalypse, Thea is trapped in a H.I.V.E. dome, Diggle just had to kill his brother, Felicity is feeling guilty for leaving Team Arrow, and Oliver Queen is arguably the most emotionally stable of the bunch. As it turns out, the season finale isn’t likely to give the team a big happily-ever-after for the hiatus, and according to showrunner Wendy Mericle, Thea in particular has a big decision to make.
Thea had bloodlust earlier in the season and since then has been questioning her place on the team, and questioning whether or not she is Speedy, which goes back to her character’s struggle with whether she’s more of a Queen or a Merlyn. She’s going to answer that question in [the finale] and come up with, what we hope, is a pretty surprising answer.
Wendy Mericle’s tease to TVGuide about what awaits Thea at the end of Season 4 is ominous but promising. Thea has had one of the best arcs of anybody in Season 4, and Willa Holland has been knocking her performances out of the park. Torn between her biological father, who wanted to help cure her bloodlust by giving her pedophiles to murder, and her innate drive to do good, Thea has struggled with herself as well as with the agents of H.I.V.E. ever since the premiere.
Frankly, it would be hard to blame Thea if she decides to wash her hands of Team Arrow and take off for a while. She’s had a rough couple of years, and discovering that her happy vacation with her hunky boyfriend was actually captivity courtesy of a guy who was drugging her is a perfectly valid excuse for a change of scenery. Besides, Oliver got to drive away from the burdens of Team Arrow at the end of Season 3. Thea deserves to clear her head.
Of course, Team Arrow is in such disarray that Oliver seems relatively emotionally healthy, so they might not be able to survive the loss of another member. Laurel’s death knocked each and every one of the survivors off balance in their own ways, and it’s hard to imagine that they’ll all be able to recover from that loss while also trying to stop a nuclear apocalypse. Team Arrow splitting in the finale – which is forebodingly entitled “Schism” – could actually make sense.
Diggle needs some recovery time from the trauma of killing his brother, which might not work too well if he’s surrounded by weaponry on a nightly basis. Felicity has the capital, intelligence, and motivation to do good for the public thanks to her resources at Palmer Tech, and she’s had enough bad luck over the past few months that she might need a big breather from the madness of vigilantism. Oliver was probably doing more good for the folks of Star City when he was running for mayor than when he was losing fights to villains du jour, so he could even retire to the public sector for a while and spend his evenings experimenting with new recipes.
Luckily, Arrow has been renewed for Season 5, so we won’t have to worry about Team Arrow breaking apart for good (or evil) even if they do go their separate ways at the end of Season 4. To see what awaits the good guys in the final stretch, tune into Arrow on Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET on The CW. Don’t forget to check out our summer TV premiere schedule.
