There’s something very DC/CW-niverse-y about the idea that Arrow—the show that started it all as a grounded and (occasionally) self-serious comic book adaptation—got the inspiration for its very last scene from someone who was mid-tranquil-state. You could almost say it appeared as a vision.
That is apparently the case for Arrow’s final scene, which saw Oliver Queen reunite with his wife Felicity in the afterlife, a reward after Oliver gave his life to save and then rebirth the entire universe during the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths.
The idea of the very last moments of the show being Ollie and Felicity looking out of a ghostly version of the Queen Consolidated offices to reminisce on the moment they actually first “met,” flashing back to one of the show’s old flashbacks, wasn’t initially in the cards. In fact, there wasn’t apparently anything set in stone for the finale at the point. That scene came, almost word for word, straight to executive producer and former Arrow showrunner Marc Guggenheim during one of his daily morning meditations.
“I meditate every morning,” Guggenheim told press at a screening of the finale, according to TV Line. “And this one morning, I came out of the meditation with the entire scene in my head, like literally word-for-word exactly [as] you just watched it….This has never happened to me before.”
From there, Guggenheim texted his fellow producer and current Arrow showrunner, Beth Schwartz, in excitement. Slight problem, meditative hand of fate or otherwise: The Arrow crew had no idea if they had even gotten Emily Bett Rickards, who played Felicity earlier in Arrow’s run, to agree to return for the finale. “Is Emily [Bett Rickards] coming back to be in it?” Guggenheim remembered wondering. “I’m like, ‘Well, now she really has to, because I really love this scene.”
And he really had to hope, as Schwartz apparently became so enamoured with the idea too that the series never considered an alternate. “We didn’t even think of another ending,” Schwartz said. “We didn’t have a backup plan at all. We were just like, ‘Emily needs to do this,’ and luckily she did.”
Oh, to be a fly on the wall for that phone call. Imagine being told a meditative state demanded you show up for a job? Stranger things have happened in the Arrowverse, at least.