Marc Guggenheim Reflects On Black Canary Death In Arrow

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Arrow kicked off an entire era of DC television for The CW nearly a decade ago, but not without some notable bumps—one big point of contention among fans was the death of Laurel Lance, a.k.a. the Black Canary in Arrow season 4. During part 2 of the interview with Andy Behbahkt on The Showrunner Whisperer, Arrow co-creator/showrunner Marc Guggenheim was asked about keeping up with the audience online and seeing reactions to various storylines. When the Black Canary death was brought up, Guggenheim looked back on the decision, which is still a talking point among Arrowverse fans to this day.

The Showrunner Whispererer: Was there any story in particular that you remember where you saw the reaction and you kind of felt that ‘Maybe we should have tackled this differently?’ One example I can think of is, obviously, the death of Laurel in Arrow season 4, which I was very upset about it because Laurel was one of my favorites. But was there anything storywise whether it was that one or anything across your time on Arrow and Legends, that you felt like, ‘Maybe we should have had a second go about this?’

Marc Guggenheim: It’s very interesting, actually – I don’t even want to call them the Legends fandom and the Arrow fandom, because obviously, there’s sort of overlap between fandom(s.) But what I’ll call the Legends tweets, and the Arrow tweets, were very, very, very different in terms of tone,. You’d almost go like, ‘These almost have to be completely separate sets of fans.’ Because with Arrow, we had a lot of angry fans, with Legends we never did, so it’s interesting. I think the death of Laurel, honestly, it wasn’t my call. The thing that would have changed Laurel’s fate, honestly wasn’t going to be Twitter, what would have changed it is if we had known that we were going to go for four more years. Had we known that the show was only reaching its midpoint, I don’t think Laurel would have been killed off. But at the time, we always saw the show as a five-year show; it didn’t really occur to us that it was going to go beyond that. I think that if we’re talking about hindsight being 20/20, I think that’s a greater factor, I don’t believe in shows changing course to satisfy a vocal set of fans.

Part of that is the way I watch television, I approach all my writing as a fan first, but I’m the kind of fan [that go,] ‘Do they do things on shows that I don’t like as a fan? ‘Sure, all the time, but it never occurred to me to have input in the process. It never occurred to me [that] showrunner X or showrunner Y should listen to what I have to say. I’m just a member of the audience, and I don’t believe television is an interactive medium. I know there’s a lot of fans who hate to hear it. I totally get that. But it’s not; I don’t think that produces good art, quite frankly. So yeah, that’s my probably controversial opinion.

I will say, in terms of things we wish we could have done differently. There’s a lot of stuff in season 4 – season 4 is probably my least favorite of all the seasons, in large part because there were things that, in hindsight, just didn’t work and things we shouldn’t have necessarily tried. I think there’s some incredibly strong episodes in season 4, don’t get me wrong, there’s some episodes that I think are really, really, really great episodes of Arrow. But overall, as a season, I think the idea to try a lighter tone, it wasn’t true to the show.

We were going for a lighter tone because the first three seasons had been so dark, and bear in mind, a lighter tone for us was very different from a lighter tone for most shows. We ended the midseason finale with Oliver and Felicity being attacked and Felicity being paralyzed. I do wish we had approached that whole storyline very differently. I’ve said this before in other interviews, but we always plan every season out of Arrow. But I think the best seasons are the ones where we give ourselves the freedom to alter course, not based on Twitter, but really just based on how the story is just playing out. There were things in season 4 that we had specifically planned for, but at specific moments in time, I think we stuck to the game plan too rigidly in a lot of places.

If I could go back and redo things, I certainly would. I will say I love the season 4 finale. We wanted to do an epic street battle with a lot of extras that felt like the end of The Dark Knight Rises. I feel like we succeeded in that there’s a lot of groundwork that’s done to introduce The Atom/Ray Palmer, which I think worked extremely well. Like I said, there are individual episodes that I liked. The finale, again, being a good example, but when you do eight seasons of television, not every season is going to be perfect.

Arrow fans often say season 4 is one of the weaker seasons, and more often than not, they point to the death of Laurel as to why. While the decision was shocking and caused a strong reaction among vocal fans, the idea of bringing back Katie Cassidy as Black Siren in the latter half of the show’s tenure eased some of the blowback. It even honored some of the character’s comic book roots of starting in one universe before moving to another to establish themselves. While the Arrowverse ends with Superman & Lois later this year, the impact Arrow has to this day is still strong.