Arrow's "different kind" of series finale "turned out to be the right way to end the show"

Deadline

Co-creator Marc Guggenheim says of ending Arrow after eight seasons: "We always knew that 'Crisis' would result in the death of Oliver, and we knew that the series finale, therefore, was going to be very different from what I had originally thought it would be. I always felt that Oliver should die at the end of Arrow. Stephen Amell and I were always very much on the same page about that. So I always thought the show would end with the death of Oliver Queen but then when we realized we were doing Crisis and we came up with the idea of Oliver dying in that story it basically made the series finale more of a coda, which is totally fine, and we always knew it was going to have a funeral. We knew a variety of different moments. What we didn’t have was what I sort of call a unifying principle. We didn’t have a theme.  We didn’t have something that tied all these different elements that we knew we wanted to have in it together." Guggenheim adds: "I was in the editing room one day and I was watching a cut for the gazillionth time I heard Stephen delivering the saga sell, which always ends with or has as part of it, came home with only one goal to save my city. I realized that’s it. He won. He achieved the goal that we’ve been reiterating for eight years, which is save his city. I think really good series finales, you’ve got to get off of Gilligan’s Island and M*A*S*H the Korean War has to end. In Arrow, he always said his mission was to save the city and we got to see through Crisis that he succeeded and give the audience a little bit of a glimpse as to what that post saving the city world looks like. What was really helpful is once I hit upon that idea it became very clear as to what the effect on the individual characters would be and that, again, sort of gave the finale the unifying principle that we were on the hunt for."

ALSO:

• Is there a chance Stephen Amell can return in the future?: "The one thing I always say, every time a character dies on any of these shows, it’s like we’ve got alternate realities, we’ve got time travel, flashbacks, you name it," says Marc Guggenheim. "We have all these different devices. No one’s ever really gone…I think it would be how we brought him back and when. If we brought him back in the seventh season premiere of Flash, it would probably diminish this a bit.
• Showrunner Beth Schwartz says Arrow writers “always left it open at the end of Season 7 to have that final scene"
• Guggenheim can't speak to some of the finale's burning questions: "That I can’t really speak to because this moment was, like a lot of things, a sort of negotiation with the powers that be about, ‘Okay, what exactly can we show? How far can we take this?’ I think it’s probably best. To me, the best approach was to let the moment speak for itself and we’ll sort of see where the future takes us.”