Wednesday night was a particularly lethal night of television with Arrow, The Americans, and Empire all killing off key supporting and celebrity guest characters. All of them also happen to be female.
The death of Laurel Lance was promised from the start of the season, Damien Dahrk threating to take Captain-Detective Lance’s (at the time) remaining daughter. That aside “at the time” brings up the odd specter death has in the DCWverse – time travel, parallel earths, Lazarus Pits – and most genre series in general. That is why you have co-showrunner Marc Guggenheim talking about how “death is not goodbye” for them. And it isn’t Katie Cassidy is signed on to appear in The Flash as her Earth-2 doppelganger the Black Siren and in the second season of animated series Vixen.
With so many outs, the effective use of death is a lot like the use of time travel stories for the audience. Even if events are changed, they still happened for the audience (maybe a character will remember) and that knowledge stays with us, affecting our read of the material. I believe it was a Marvel Fear Itself tie in that dealt with the nature of “death” in the Marvel U. A Daily Bugle writer interviewed with Ms. Marvel (Danvers) on the Schrodinger's cate-esque nature death has on the superhero populace. Ultimately all Marvel can come up with is that it’s still real even in its impermanence. They didn’t know if they’d be coming back, their friends and families didn’t know if/when they’d be coming back. It still happened. It still affected change.
The loss of Laurel Lance will change things. She may not have been the shows emotional heart like Felicity. Or the moral one like Diggle. But Laurel turned into the ultimate supporting character, often acting as literal support for characters as well as being an emotional confidant for everyone on the team. Early on in the season there was a brief scene where Diggle tells Laurel about Andy being alive, she was the first person he told. It’s Laurel who took Thea in after Ollie left town. Laurel was the first person that Vixen hugged when she guest spotted in “Taken”. She was a greatly empathetic character, which played to Cassidy’s melodramatic strengths, and would often rightly call Oliver out on his pigheadedness. Laurel Lance on Arrow may not have been the spitting image of her source material counterpart but she was the character this show needed and still had that Canary spirit.
A favorite scene of hers this season was the hallway sequence in in 405 “Haunted”. Wherein she asserted her own agency and the legitimacy of her own desires to bring Sara back from the dead against Oliver’s typical controlling ways. The Lance family has always served as collateral damage of Queen family hubris. Laurel’s death surprisingly isn’t, well kind of. Ollie did shoot the arrow Dahrk stabbed her with, an insane act with how often they go for that move and it never ever works. You could make the case that this is another rendition of thoughtlessly ‘fridgeing’ female character. And in a season where they awkwardly paralyze and heal Felicity you could have a good two handed argument. I wouldn’t go there just yet, one of the core reasons the whole “women in refrigerators” trope is lame is the lack of meaningful follow up. Arrow hasn’t gotten a chance show us its follow up yet. The episode ends on her death.
The overriding thematic motif of this season is family and now we have a death in it. “Eleven Fifty Nine” also featured a betrayal of familial trust with Andy Diggle. Team Arrow like the Bat-Family is a surrogate one for the victims of trauma (and lovers of leather). This uniting thread was starting to fray before Laurel’s death and it is more sense it. With five episodes remaining in the season what end statement will Arrow give on the nature of family?
I am Michael Mazzacane you can follow me on Twitter and at ComicWeek.org
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