ARROW: Andrew Kreisberg and Geoff Johns Tease The Flash’s Introduction and Impact on Starling City

ARROW may be just getting ready for its second season, but already The CW is looking to expand the DC universe — ARROW will officially be bringing in Barry Allen (Flash) for an arc during the upcoming season of ARROW with the hopes of spinning it off.

“It really started with [ARROW executive producer] Greg Berlanti,” ARROW executive producer Andrew Kreisberg told reporters on a conference call this afternoon. “The Flash was his favorite character as a kid growing up, and he’s obviously been a strong, personal favorite of [ARROW executive producer] Geoff [Johns] and mine. So when Greg approached us one day and said, ‘What do you think if we did Flash as a spinoff?,’ all of us lit up. Despite the fact that he has super powers, there’s something very relatable about Barry of all the big seven of the Justice League. He got his powers by accident; he’s not a god, he’s not an alien. He wasn’t seeking this out, it came to him. So his reaction to that feels very human and grounded…Oliver Queen is a very dark and tortured soul, and Barry is not. I think it’ll be fun…to see these two characters together, because they both have distinctly different world views, while deeply caring about right and wrong.”

“And Barry’s somebody who is a cop,” Johns teased. “He follows the law, he follows the rules, he’s the last person in the world who would ever think about being a vigilante.”

In fact, Barry will be working for the good guys when ARROW viewers are first introduced to him. (Barry is currently scheduled to appear in episodes 8, 9, and 20 — all of which written by Berlanti, Kreisberg, and Johns, while episode 20 will be directed by David Nutter.)

“When we first meet Barry Allen, he’s just a forensic scientist working for the police department,” Kreisberg explained. “He’s just an ordinary man when we meet him. As we always do on ARROW, we try to keep things as grounded and realistic as possible. And that is a way the audience will get introduced to Barry and get to know him a little bit faster.”

“I think that’s part of the fun for the audience for the ride: to see how we do our ARROW take on the Flash legacy,” Kreisberg added. “I think some of it will feel very familiar and some of it will feel hopefully fresh and exciting. The same way we approached ARROW is the same way we’re approaching Barry.”

One of the things that will be new in ARROW’s second season is that the residents of Starling City will be forced to deal with the fallout from Barry’s powers.

“Our characters who we’ve come to know and like in ARROW will react to the extraordinary changes to their world, hopefully the very realistic way, so these ‘powers’ won’t be treated as common-place,” Kreisberg said. “The world — and our characters in them — will react accordingly…As excited as we are to write for Barry, we’re really excited about what Barry’s arrival is going to mean for Oliver, for Dig, for Felicity, for everybody. He’s a great character who’s going to affect all of our characters’ lives.”

“What’s really nice is they’re both going to learn from each other, so when Barry comes into Oliver’s life, he’s going to have a profound impact on it,” Kreisberg added. “We always talk about the villains — we don’t do these things as gimmicks. We figure out what it’s going to mean for our characters and what’s the most exciting thing we can tell our characters. And for this season, especially as Oliver is embarking on this new mission of trying to be a hero, he comes in contact with somebody, that for as much as Oliver thinks he’s being a hero, Barry won’t always think that.”

And Barry will get a good feel of Oliver’s world — for the first two episodes of the arc, Barry will be spending his time in Starling City, before the final episode shifts things a bit…and the potential is there to meet other characters from the Flash universe.

“Eight and nine will take place in Starling City, which Barry has come to,” Kreisberg teased. “Episode 20 will be a bigger introduction to Barry’s world, where the first few episodes are Barry coming to the ARROW world.”

But who the heck is going to play this guy? The producers teased blondes would be preferred, now that the news is out there, the can start searching for the perfect actor to fill the role.

“We were actually waiting for the news to come out, because we really want to open this up to everyone,” Kreisberg said. “It would have been hard to look for an actor and say, ‘You’re guest-starring on ARROW, but we can’t tell you who it is.’ So this way, everybody knows now, and we can go and earn this.”

While ultimately this arc is intended to launch a whole new Flash series, if that doesn’t come to be, Kreisberg said it was too soon to know what that would mean for Barry’s presence on ARROW.

“Honestly, we’re really not looking that far ahead,” he said. “For right now, we’re really focusing on these episodes of ARROW that Barry Allen is partaking in. For this season, especially, this is in addition to ARROW. We’re not trying to take away anything from ARROW, we’re really trying to add to ARROW.”

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Are you excited to see Flash on ARROW?

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