‘Arrow’ Just Had One Heck of a Time-Bending Twist

The final season of Arrow has been firing on all cylinders, except for one, confusingly shoe-horned in part: the flash-forwards to the Star City of 2040. It’s not that the sections were bad, per say, but with barely any time left in this abbreviated season, they took screen-time away from Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) and his quest to stop the upcoming “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” and overall seemed unnecessary to the plot of the show. That is, until this week’s episode dropped one heck of a time-bending twist.

Spoilers for Arrow Season 8, Episode 3 “Leap of Faith” past this point.

In the episode, Oliver is wrestling with blindly following Mar Novu (LaMonica Garrett), a.k.a. the godlike being known as The Monitor, who had previously told the hero that they were working to stop the Crisis. Only as Oliver found out this week, whether he means to or not it seems like The Monitor will cause The Crisis (don’t worry, nobody knows about his brother The Anti-Monitor yet).

Meanwhile, in the future Oliver’s kids Mia Smoak (Katherine McNamara) and William Clayton (Ben Lewis) are working with Oliver’s partner John Diggle’s (David Ramsey) son Connor Hawke (Joseph David-Jones) to stop Diggle’s other son, J.J. (Charlie Barnett) from destroying Star City. They do, in fact, manage to stop him, but not before he kills their ally Zoe Ramirez (Andrea Sixtos). They’re beaten up, broken… And suddenly engulfed in a bright, white light.

As Oliver leaves Nanda Parbat, where he tracked down info on The Monitor, he’s also covered in the light, finding himself back in the Star City of 2019. There he sees Diggle, as well as teammates Dinah Drake (Juliana Harkavy) and Rene Ramirez (Rick Gonzalez) inside the “Arrow Cave.” He’s confused, doesn’t understand what he’s doing there, and is even more confused when he turns around and sees the terrified faces of William, Connor and Mia.

“Dad?” Mia asks, shocked, and we smash to credits.

…And I have to apologize, because it’s clear now that those flash-forwards were all to set up this collision. We’ve known for a while that Mia would be in “Crisis,” which makes sense since the upcoming CW event will bring together nearly every character in the Arrow-verse, as well as guest stars throughout DC Comics based TV history. But seeing the Star City 2040 gang in the present, episodes before “Crisis” will kick off, is a huge twist on par with the premiere’s reveal that the Crisis has already begun, with the destruction of Earth-2.

Point being, Arrow‘s writing staff — shocker — knows what they’re doing here. Not only is Oliver at the point where he’s starting to doubt himself and his mission, as well as the idea of going things alone; but the Star City 2040 crew is at their lowest point, when they most need their Dads. Thanks to, one assumes, The Monitor, they’re all together now.

It also neatly sets up the circumstances for a potential spinoff: this season’s penultimate episode will be a backdoor pilot focusing on Mia as Green Arrow, and Dinah and Laurel Lance (Katie Cassidy, who directed the episode) as Black Canaries. Seems like we’ll be heading in a direction of Oliver heading towards his impending death in “Crisis” knowing that he has a daughter capable of taking up his mantle.

The crazier part? We’re only three episodes in, and have already had at least two universe-changing twists. What else does Arrow Season 8 have in store?

Arrow airs Tuesdays at 9/8c on The CW

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