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This interview with Stephen was published in an Australian newspaper when he was here in June and it seems like he was expecting the show to continue on after his exit, which doesn’t exactly line up with what Marc is saying in the TVLine article. https://thewest.com.au/entertainment/tv/arrow-star-bids-farewell-in-perth-ng-b881237159z

It was slightly annoying that they were trying to sell the season as something other than what it is. Yes, there is a flash forward storyline but at least 8 episodes of the season will support the set up and execution of the crossover. The final two episodes are a toss up. I’m assuming that they’ll wrap up the impacts of the crossover on Star City and close out Arrow.

I’m so happy they slowed down the episode at the end and gave Oliver and Felicity the time they deserved in the closing minutes. It was the saving grace of the episode (and season), for me. I admit that I was more than a little sceptical about them writing a decent closure for it.

They left too much story for the final episode and trying to do two finales in one and farewell Felicity meant everything was rushed. Emiko went from villain to non-villain at lightning speed. I think they spent too much time off on story tangents and experimenting with new story telling methods this season and then had to rush to the end leaving plot holes behind. I still don’t know how William knew where Felicity’s office was in Smoak Tech and could recognize her specific coding, but apparently never saw her again after he left with his grandparents - but I may not have been paying full attention this season.

I didn’t find future Zoe that interesting. But I don’t know if that’s because they saddled her with future Dinah AND future Rene or because I’m completely canaried out and don’t need version 4.0 of that character or want to see an entire network of canaries. In any case, I’ve managed to completely tune out whatever her plot was in the flash forwards. I know she was in them, but I can’t tell you what she did.

I’m glad Stephen more or less confirmed that Oliver is on Monitor tasks for S8. It’s probably going to annoy me for awhile that the show was pushed down this pathway simply because TPTB wanted the Crisis crossover.

Dinah getting a tattoo of the four pillars of heroism and then immediately discarding the loyalty one to believe Felicity had turned villainous fits nicely with her flip flopping personality this season.

I’m a little confused about the Mark of Four tattoo. Oliver listed the four components, Courage, Compassion, Selflessness and Loyalty, but where/how did the tattoo factor into it? I can’t really remember, but is Dinah the only one who had the tattoo? I thought it was something they all had but now I’m not sure. It feels like it was meant to be important but was left dangling. Did I miss something along the way?

Their dedication to not understating what the show presents onscreen is remarkable. Who, if not Oliver, did they think Felicity was talking about when she said to The Monitor “I’ve been waiting a very long time to see him”? The biggest problem anyone wanting a GA/BC pairing will always have, with Stephen and Katie in the roles, is their lack of spark and romantic chemistry. I don’t think that’s going to be fixed or undergo a miraculous change simply because Emily/Felicity is no longer on the show.

My expectations for the finale were low but it was much better than I thought it would be. The final Olicity scenes with Stephen and Emily were perfect. I’m not usually a teary person for TV shows but those scenes and how they played the scenes really worked for me. I wish I’d cared a little more about Emiko, but I didn’t, so her flip to redemption didn’t make that much of an impact. I think they left too much to cover in the final episode. I will always be a little resentful that Arrow couldn’t end on its own terms because of the crossover. I’m happy that Oliver and Felicity were reunited in wherever that glowy wormhole took her, but I’ll never like that they had to sacrifice so much for with a 20 year separation and missing out on raising their kids together. It’s not perfect ending, but it’ll be my series finale. As much as I love Oliver Queen, without Felicity, Olicity and all the things that I loved about the show a S8 isn’t that appealing. But, if they’re both back for 810 then I’ll come back.

The last time Beth said she cried over a scene was the pregnancy reveal and it sped by so quickly there was barely a chance to tear up. Which means I’ve adjusted my expectations for the finale and the final 10 minutes accordingly. The fan detectives on Twitter think the “spoiler” in the background of the EBR photo Bamford posted is Curtis, which is not exciting...or a spoiler because he was in the episode stills. If they think Curtis is an interesting reveal then they haven’t been paying attention to fan response to him.

It disappoints me that the show I used to rush home to watch feels like a hollow shell of what it used to be. There’s been a lot of plots and gotchas in the previous seasons that I didn’t particularly enjoy but the things I loved about the show always outweighed everything else. It’s completely flipped now and the things that are aggravating are outweighing the parts that I still like and the feeling of misery running through the show really isn’t enjoyable to me.

It’s like S5 where everyone was concerned about gun control for one episode and then in the next episode they were staging multiple shoot outs with machine guns everywhere. Arrow is not at all self-aware.

Tommy’s surprise! returns are so frequent (at least 6 since his S1 death) and combined with the fact that it’s Felicity’s second last episode and they’re handing out the minimum of Olicity content, I’m finding it very hard to care and wonder why we’re wasting time on this in the run up to the finale. The season finale itself sounds jam packed going by Beth’s description on TVLine. The flash forward characters have a finale, the present day characters have a finale and there’s action, action, action and surprise character returns. Will they be able to fit everything into 42 minutes without rushing on through? The pacing of the story on this show will always confuse me. In any case, I’m going to try and keep my expectations set to low and hopefully be pleasantly surprised by what they deliver.

This is the exact problem I’m having with Emiko - boo hoo, so she’s suffered a little trauma in life. We’ve watched as Oliver survived five years in hell where his father committed suicide in front of him, he was tortured and had to fight for his survival. His body bares every scar as a visual reminder of that trauma. In the past 7 years he’s watched his mother get murdered in front of him, a sister stabbed and revived by Lazarus Pit, his fiancé shot and paralysed, his best friend & two former girlfriends all killed. He was tortured again, forced to join the LOA, killed his own Earth X doppelgänger, survived Slabside, and on and on we go and he’s not running around trying to kill people because of it. He’s still a good man with good intentions. Meanwhile, we’ve known Emiko for a handful of episodes and so far it looks more like she’s throwing a tantrum by leading a terrorist organisation and wanting to personally destroy Oliver, his legacy and a city full of people all because her Dad didn’t love her enough. The writers didn’t set up enough motivation for Emiko for me to see her actions any other way than over the top for her underlying issue and misplaced in directing so much anger at Oliver.

I was surprised that they even asked what fans thought but they were very proud of their “true crime” storytelling technique so maybe they expected praise. They’re often caught off guard by the response they get from the audience. The problem is that fans are more invested in the characters and the story being told than the method in which it’s delivered. They must know by now that Dinah is a divisive character and at this point in the season, and with the countdown underway to Emily’s departure, fan expectations were high about where the focus would be.

This is me. I’ve stopped caring about the show and 90% of the characters. Waiting through 19 episodes for Roy to finally get a plot and it’s something that could’ve been dealt with in a few scenes much earlier in the season. For the episode to work Roy had to choose to withhold vital information from Oliver. Roy really didn’t think to tell Oliver that he’d been Lazarus pitted and could be unexpectedly ragey? Seriously? Even though he’d seen what happened to Thea in the same situation? It makes no sense, much like Emiko’s anger at Oliver over something he had no knowledge about. It’s the run up to the season finale and it should be ramping up the excitement level not leave me feeling like they’re wasting time with so few episodes left.

I don’t understand Emiko’s relentless anger towards Oliver. She wants to destroy Oliver’s legacy but I don’t really know why? The show established that Oliver knew nothing about Emiko’s existence. His father and mother both lied and kept secrets but how and why is Oliver to blame for the actions they took? Emiko bluntly tells Oliver she knew about the Gambit and could’ve prevented it. Oliver suffered five years in hell, became the Green Arrow and spent time in prison and she still wants him to suffer more because...Robert was an awful father? I haven’t been paying close attention for the last few episodes so am I missing something here? There are two episodes left. They’re running out of time, and I’m running out of patience, for this plot to make sense. I feel like the season will end as miserably as it began and I don’t know how they’ll wrap everything up without rushing through.

I hope there’s a surprising “gotcha” with Dinah and it’s not what it seems. Otherwise I don’t know what they’re thinking in writing her so consistently awful and flipping back and forth on trusting Oliver. She knows there’s more than one archer in the city that could be the source of the arrows. She knows about evil Emiko and her vendetta against Oliver. She can’t possibly be that appallingly bad at her job, right? Right!?!? I will say that it’s becoming very clear why Oliver and Felicity never told Dinah about baby Mia. I wouldn’t keep her in the loop on information like that either and I wouldn’t be getting a tattoo that calls for loyalty and selflessness with her either.

There are a lot of people who bought tickets for HVFF that are now very unhappy with Stephen under that tweet. I might be on the wrong track here but didn’t he have part ownership or profit participation in HVFF? It seems so odd to announce he’s attending HVFF, then cancel and then rebook for a rival con for the same dates and city. I’m curious to know what happened with HVFF - they seem to be having a lot of problems lately,

I never would’ve picked David as the cast member to do an app that asks fans to subscribe and pay for content. It baffles me because he’s never really been that active on the SM accounts he already has.

Once Emily announced she was leaving a countdown started around the number of episodes left with Felicity. I think it triggered a lot of Felicity fans (myself included) to look at S7 as the final season and endpoint of the show. I look at the final episodes now and wonder why they’re spending more time and focus on Captain Dinah and the SCPD when there’s only a handful of episodes left with Felicity. It’s totally the wrong way to view, I know they have to give all the characters something to do, but that’s where I am with the show. I agree that Greg Berlanti underestimated how important Felicity is to the show. But, I also think he might not have seen it as critical to lock Emily down for S8 because it’s probably more directed to serving the crossover (they want the masked characters onboard), and a potential future kids spin-off (I don’t think they hired Kat Macnamara to play a handful of episodes as the Olicity kid), than serving Arrow and the previous 7 years.

Maybe they’ll treat Felicity’s absence like they did with William after he moved away with his grandparents. We’ve already seen that Oliver is easily thwarted by a mailbox full message so maybe the explanation will be Felicity goes into hiding with baby Mia, Oliver tries to call her to check in, gets no answer so he...moves on past it. 🙂 Felicity leaving do her own thing only works if we overlook the fact that in the flash forwards Felicity is still wearing her wedding ring and her computer screen has a full length picture of Oliver in his Green Arrow costume. If she left Oliver behind voluntarily why is she still holding onto either of those things?

There have been parts of every season that I haven’t particularly enjoyed, but this season and its doom and gloom in multiple timelines has been a hard slog for me. There are too many characters spread over a jumble of storylines that get stalled while they go off on tangents. They brought Roy back but he’s had so little plot or purpose, so far, I’m left wondering why he was added back into an already overloaded cast. It feels like Oliver has been on the sidelines of his own show and there is way too much Dinah in present and future. I have to wonder if they placed the needs of crossover and the hopes for a spin-off above what was best for Arrow. I thought I’d be holding on and enjoying the few remaining episodes with Felicity but I’m already checking out with three episodes to go. I’m interested to see where the bottom might be for number of viewers by the end of the season.

If DR is trying to sell me on watching S8 then he failed. It really does sound like he’s implying that Felicity leaving means that the show is no longer being held back from telling big stories. OTA hasn’t been much of anything for several seasons now. Felicity being part of the show didn’t stop them from introducing Dinah, Rene & Curtis and spending time on stories for them. Felicity being present also wouldn’t stop them from exploring E90 John Diggle as Green Lantern. They only have 10 episodes in S8, one of those will be the crossover and one will have to wrap up the series as the finale. That leaves 8 episodes so how big can the big, big stories be in the episodes that are left? At this stage I don’t think I’m going to regret not watching whatever they do for S8.