At times the debate as to which woman Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) will end up with – Laurel Lance (Katie Cassidy) or Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett-Rickards) – on the CW’s Arrow is so loud it’s easy to forget that romance is but a small part of the show. Oliver spends the majority of his time fighting crime and navigating murky family politics, and as this is a DC show (and not a Marvel one) his need to hide his secret identity as a vigilante crime fighter will forever make personal relationships a secondary, unsatisfying aspect of his life.
However, Oliver did manage to find the time for at least three romantic relationships in the show’s first season (Helena “Huntress’ Bertinelli, Detective McKenna Hall, Laurel Lance) and had another for the taking that he turned down (Shado) from the island flashbacks portion of the show. So, that’s two assassins, a police officer, and a lawyer for the downtrodden. Might he add a certain bespectacled, blonde IT girl whose name when combined with his comes out to Olicity to the list next season? Or should he stick with “love of his life” Laurel who also happens to be the woman he most recently slept with?
For obvious reasons, the show’s producers and writers aren’t really tipping their hands on the subject, merely hinting that Oliver and Laurel are headed for drama while staying almost entirely silent about Felicity. So, at this point anything new is interesting, and here is what Oliver Queen himself – Stephen Amell – recently told Access Hollywood about Oliver/Laurel and Oliver/Felicity:
On where things between Laurel and Oliver pick up at the start of Season 2.
Oliver and Laurel sharing a kiss in the season finale…you know, the finale where he totally failed and half the city was destroyed.
“Based on everything that happens in the finale, I think it’s going to be difficult for Oliver and Laurel to just pick up and go on like nothing’s happened. They had a wedge between them which was Sarah and all that Oliver did to her and now [everything] that’s happened with Tommy and the aftermath of that, it’s going to be extremely difficult for them to just pick up from where they were. In the comic books [Green Arrow and Black Canary] connect, but we’re still dealing with ‘Oliver and Laurel’ and ‘Oliver and Thea’ and ‘Oliver and Moira’ and basically Oliver and everyone except Felicity and Diggle – they’re not operating on a truthful level. So we’re never really going to know what Oliver’s relationship with Laurel can be until everything is on the table. And ‘when’ everything is on the table and ‘if’ that actually happens, I have no idea.”
On a relationship with fan favorite character, Felicity Smoak.
Oliver and Felicity displaying their obvious “just friends” status. Real brother and sister vibe there. Nothing more. You hear me, nothin…okay, the show is totally teasing the shippers with these two.
“We just talked about how much Laurel doesn’t know about Oliver but there’s a history there. With Felicity, there’s not necessarily a history but in terms of women in his life at present, she knows him better than anybody. Which is not saying a great deal but…I don’t know, I’m very touched that the internet has such a fascination and the fanbase has such a fascination with Felicity and Oliver and I think it really speaks to Emily Bett-Rickards because when she first played the character in episode 3, I remember [Oliver] meeting her and coming around the corner – and we didn’t really rehearse full speed – so when I came around the corner and she did her whole [Felicity thing] I cracked a smile which may have been the first time my character had smiled in the entire show. So I give all the credit to her. The writers will do what the writers will do.”
[Access Hollywood via ComicBookMovie.com via io9.com]
This is how the fanning the flames of internet shippers is played, people – you give just enough information to be intriguing without actually saying anything concrete. Amell goes into slightly more specific details about Laurel and Oliver than he has in the past, although nothing he said should be surprising to anyone who has even a basic familiarity with the hero with secret identity/love interest who doesn’t know his secret dynamic. Plus, don’t you just want to go re-watch the third episode now to see the moment Amell is talking about where Bett-Rickards’ performance was so charming it elicited Oliver’s first on-screen smile of the season? Regardless of if you are an Olicity person or otherwise, that’s kind of a cool little tidbit to have in the back of your head the next time you see the scene in question.
How much longer do we have to wait for season 2? The CW announced their scheduled premiere dates yesterday, and the second season of Arrow is scheduled to premiere in the US on October 9th.
I’ve previously written about Arrow‘s Oliver, Laurel, and Felicity problem, and you can read that article in full here.
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