CW’s Arrow is successful for a number of reasons, it has an outstanding cast, but it also has one of the best creative team on television and one of them is show-runner/EP Marc Guggenheim.
Last Saturday afternoon at San Diego Comic-Con, TVOvermind was able to participate in roundtables with Arrow and we got to ask Mr. Guggenheim about the overall theme for all the characters this season as well as if we are going to see flashbacks to one of the new major players of the show, Ray Palmer who will be played by the great Brandon Routh. These are the questions we specifically asked at the roundtable.
TVOvermind’s Andy Behbakht: What is the overall theme for all the characters this season?
Marc Guggenheim: That’s a great question actually because usually it’s hard to answer, usually we just have a season long arc for Oliver and a season long theme for Oliver and theme doesn’t impact all the characters necessarily. This year is different, this year the theme is identity and the trailer that we released last night [referring to the Comic-Con panel for Arrow the day before], you know “man can’t live by two names”, a lot of season 3 is going to be about can Oliver be Oliver Queen or the Arrow? Can he be both? Which one is he, it’s the concept of identity. But what is cool about this theme is that every other character on the show is going through the same thing.
Every other character on the show is dealing with some question of identity. Who am I, what am I, what am I doing? Let me give you an example: Detective Lance who is now Captain Lance has basically taken a desk job and he is like “If I can’t be a cop the way I used to be a cop, what am I?” He is dealing with identity. Laurel is going to be dealing with this question of identity as she tries to walk the path that her sister walks. Is Thea Malcolm Merlyn’s daughter or Moira Queen’s daughter? Who is she? Diggle: “am I a sidekick, am I my own man?” Felicity: “do I have my own identity?”
All the characters are going to be wrestling with this in various different forms [of this question of identity]. It’s like a diamond that we are looking through all the different facets to all the different characters throughout the season and that to me is part of the fun of the most exciting aspect of season 3. Because like I said, we have never really had that kind of, really clear theme running throughout the entire year that affects everybody which I think is cool.
TVO: On the subject of Ray Palmer and before I ask the question, is Brandon Routh going to be in 14 episodes as reported?
Guggenheim: It’s funny, before it was reported as 14 [episodes], but my recollection quite frankly is that we made a deal for 16 episodes.
TVO: Even better! So now that we have that question out of the way, will there be any flashbacks to Ray Palmer perhaps because we saw a little sign in a recent Flash trailer about Palmer Industries is perhaps going to appear there. So will there be flashbacks to him since he is now going to be a very big character in the Arrow universe?
Guggenheim: He will be and we have talked about maybe doing a flashback oriented episode [for Ray].
TVO: Like The Odyssey?
Guggenheim: [thinks] we are definitely going to do an episode around the middle of the year like we typically do like “The Odyssey”, like “The Promise” where it’s mostly flashbacks as opposed to mostly present day We will probably do that centered around Oliver in Hong Kong. But one thing that we did a little bit, once in season 1 and we had success with that so we kept doing it more and more in season 2 and we had a lot of success with that.
And that was to do non-Oliver centric flashbacks or non-Island [centric flashbacks] and now non- Hong Kong centric flashbacks. We are going to do more and more of those and surely Ray is fair game. We have talked about flashing back to the night of the siege which was the season finale and seeing those events from a different perspective and that may include Ray.
Stay tuned for more interviews with the cast of Arrow here on TVOvermind!
Arrow kicks off its third season on Wednesday, October 8, 8/7c on The CW.
[Photo via The CW]
Follow Us
