How Stephen Amell's Return To The Flash As Oliver Queen Addressed An Arrow Series Finale Issue
Spoilers ahead for Episode 9 of The Flash Season 9, called “It’s My Party and I’ll Die If I Want To.”
The episodes are counting down until The Flash ends its nine-season run on The CW, and the latest threw Barry a birthday party that was an excellent excuse to bring in some familiar faces from across the Arrowverse. The most notable, of course, was former Arrow star Stephen Amell, whose Green Arrow is responsible for launching the entire superhero universe that spanned six series at its peak after the “Crisis on Infinite Earths” crossover. The Flash had to revisit that Crisis to bring back the late Oliver Queen, and in the process addressed an issue of mine with the Arrow series finale that has been lingering since that show ended in 2020.
As fans will undoubtedly remember, Oliver actually died (twice) and became the Spectre in the “Crisis on Infinite Earths” crossover, with two episodes of Arrow left to go before the final credits rolled. He didn’t even appear in the penultimate episode, which was the “Green Arrow and the Canaries” backdoor pilot that ultimately was not picked up to series. Most of Amell’s screentime in the series finale was via flashback until the very end, when he had an afterlife sequence with Felicity after they’d spent decades apart.
At the time, I was divided on whether or not he got a happy ending, but it just didn’t feel right to me that Oliver Queen – the founder of the Arrowverse – was killed off in “Crisis,” absent from his show’s penultimate episode, and barely had any non-flashback moments in the series finale. In fact, his role in The Flash’s “It’s My Party and I’ll Die If I Want To” on April 26 gave him more substantive screentime than his own finale. Admittedly, I haven't kept up with watching the Arrowverse regularly in recent years, but it was enough to fix my problem that Arrow ended without giving the Green Arrow a real goodbye with him on screen.
Plus, the episode touched on some leftover questions from the series finale. When Barry, upset at the fact that he had been killed by Wally under the influence of Ramsey Rosso, accused Spectre-Oliver of bringing back everybody he loved once he got his powers, Oliver pointed out that it was “not everyone,” because he didn’t bring back his father. He continued:
Bringing him back would have done too much to alter reality, and I’d already done enough to dishonor his sacrifice. When my father sacrificed himself, when he gave me my extra years, what was I doing with them? I was wasting them. I was drowning myself in this sea of pain and darkness, and saying… ‘If you cross one more name off the list, if you save your city one more time, then you’ll absolve yourself of all this guilt.’ And I was wrong. This guilt is never going to go away. It is something that you have to learn to live with. That is why people sacrificed themselves. That is why I sacrificed myself for you, so that in all of this darkness, you could be a guiding light. A hero.
Hearing straight from Oliver why his dad wasn’t brought back in the Arrow finale like Moira and Tommy were was far better than the speculation from that episode… and a nice confirmation that Oliver knew better than to set off his own Spectre version of Flashpoint like when Barry brought his mom back.
Plus, Oliver got to reunite and spend some time with Diggle, which was so great that I decided to stop worrying about the details of how and why this was at all possible even in the rule-breaking world of The Flash. In the process, he cleared up what that green box from the Arrow finale actually meant, and it should stop any speculation that there’s a Green Lantern ring meant for Dig out there. According to Oliver:
John, that cube was designed to tempt you, but you did the right thing, and now all of your brightest days are ahead of you because they’ll be spent with your family.
Dig went on to say that Oliver is his family, and he’s just glad that he got to say goodbye this time. As an Arrow loyalist even to this day, I’m with Diggle on that one! Sadly, there was no Olicity reunion, but Oliver did at least mention why he couldn’t visit his wife and their kids. When Dig asked if he was going to see her, Oliver got emotional and responded:
My powers came with rules. Me and Felicity… our destiny has been written.
While that doesn’t make the bittersweet ending to Arrow any less bitter on the Olicity front given what had already been established back in the Season 7 finale, it did result in an update on the kids from Diggle: William is in college, and Mia has mastered the salmon ladder. Throw in Oliver getting back in the Green Arrow suit, an epic action sequence without superpowers, and one last “You have failed this city,” and I was satisfied that the character finally got a worthy goodbye from the Arrowverse.
Was it occasionally cheesy? Sure. Will I always and forever hate it when Oliver is called "Ollie" by anybody other than his sister in the Arrowverse? Evidently, yes! Do I wish that he’d gotten more screentime in the present in his own finale than in this episode of The Flash? Of course, but I’m just glad that The Flash was able to bring Stephen Amell back one last time as the Green Arrow. Even Grant Gustin hadn’t been sure that it could happen!
So, will “Crisis on Infinite Earths” go down as the best thing that the Arrowverse did, the most ruinous thing the Arrowverse ever did, or something in the middle? That’s a matter of opinion (and I know that I’m not a fan when looking back), but this episode of The Flash addressed some of my Arrow-centric issue with that crossover and how it affected the Arrow finale. The episode also may have secured the survival of the Arrowverse in DC’s future plans.
For what remains of the Arrowverse at this point, keep tuning in to The CW on Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET for the final episodes of The Flash. You can also revisit the highs and lows of Arrow streaming with a Netflix subscription.
