ARROW: Marc Guggenheim and Wendy Mericle Tease Season 4

ARROW is back for its fourth season and Oliver is…happy?!

Naturally, it might not last long. (And more on that after the premiere airs.) But in the meantime, ARROW showrunners Marc Guggenheim and Wendy Mericle spoke with reporters about what’s coming up this year on The CW series…

Malcolm is the new Ra’s…and not everyone is thrilled.

“You’ll see him early, and… his arc for the season is really revolving around Thea and trying to be a good father while also being the very evil, badass Ra’s al Ghul,” Mericle said. “I don’t know how you work that out, but if anyone can do it, it’s Malcolm and John Barrowman playing him.”

“He’s going to be different with respect to Thea, we hope – we would like him to find a way to be a father,” she continued. “He doesn’t really know what that means as a character. That said, we do want to restore him to more of the season 1 Malcolm who was going around and messing up Oliver’s plans and anyone else he can cross paths with.”

And as Malcolm sets out to repair his relationship with his daughter, Ra’s’ daughter, Nyssa will not be pleased with her father’s replacement.

“Yes, you will definitely see Nyssa,” Mericle said. “She’s definitely not going to be on board with Malcolm as Ra’s. We’re hoping to take that in a cool, very fighty-fight orientated direction.”

Laurel is now the “full-fledged Black Canary.”

“When we come back she’s definitely the full-fledged Black Canary,” Mericle said. “So she’s going to be a crucial part of the team going forward and she’s really going to be grappling…the overarching theme of the season is about chosen family versus blood family. And she’s really going to be dealing with Sarah coming back but also with her family on her team and also her dad when she discovers what you’re not supposed to talk about and what’s in the premiere. There are going to be ramifications for her and him as well.

Felicity is getting her humor back.

“[Funny Felicity is returning] with a vengeance,” Guggenheim teased. “So funny. Emily [Bett Rickards (Felicity)] is…we were in the editing room yesterday and we were like, she’s just on the top of her game. She is hysterical. We’re definitely writing jokes for her but she’s also finding humor in lines that weren’t intentionally humorous. She’s really dialed in.”

And elsewhere, the show is thinking about finally introducing Felicity’s father.

“Felicity’s dad remains a topic [of discussion]…we were talking about it in the room the other day,” Guggenheim shared. “We’re always talking about it. I think, again, we have to find the right story and the right moment. I guess we trust our own process, that it will come to us when it’s meant to come to us. Just like with the comics, how we don’t sit there with a check list. We don’t sit there with a list of cards we want to turn over. We have a deck of cards we know we can turn over, but it’s about finding the right moment — not just doing it to do it.”

Mr. Terrific is coming!

“He’s amazing; Echo Kellum (Mr. Terrific) is just fun and we love him,” Mericle said. “He really is a way for us to have a kind of … to eventually bring on a member of the team who has a tech background but he’s also for somebody for Felicity to talk to and have scenes with. With Ray Palmer, obviously, moving on to greener pastures, we needed somebody and we pulled Mr. Terrific from the comic books and cast Echo and it just turned out to be one of those things that was just everything we hoped for. It’s just very magical. They’re great together.”

ARROW will be moving away from its (slightly) more procedural elements this season.

“We’re working to work a few of those [bad guys of the week] in here and there, but one of the things we wanted to explore this year was seeing a big bad from the get-go and giving him a lot of room to play and challenge Oliver and the team and see what that gave us,” Mericle said. “We’ve done a lot of the gradual reveals of the big bads in previous season and by front-loading it, we feel like it presented a challenge both for us as writers and to the team. We’re intrigued to see where that takes us.”

“For better or worse, I think our sense of the fan reaction to season 2 was that it didn’t seem there was a whole lot of love for the villain of the week episodes,” Guggenheim added. “So I think you started to see us steer away from them in season 3. But it’s funny, I always think sometimes the audience wants the thing you’re not giving them. So the pendulum has probably swung back the other way. It’s an interesting sort of balance. And we like the villain of the week episodes but what we discovered is that those episodes are only as good as the casting. You gotta really cast someone great otherwise that episode does fall flat.”

–

ARROW airs Wednesdays at 8 PM on The CW.

Follow @GiveMeMyRemote and @marisaroffman on Twitter for the latest TV news. Connect with other TV fans on GIVE ME MY REMOTE’s official Facebook page.

And to be the first to see our exclusive videos by subscribing to our YouTube channel at youtube.com/givememyremotetv