‘Arrow’ Final Season to Take Place in Earth-1 Timeline

TCA 2019: And to fans who think the ending will be “X or Y,” executive producer Marc Guggenheim says, “We have Z planned”

Arrow
The CW

The eighth and final season of The CW’s “Arrow” series will take place in the primary timeline on Earth-1, executive producer Beth Schwartz confirmed to TV critics Sunday at the Television Critics Association summer press tour.

For those not familiar with the timeline of the series, Earth-1 is a parallel universe to several other Earths and is the center of the multiverse, from where one can travel to any other alternate Earth.

Series star Stephen Amell added that Season 8 will take place in 2019, with Schwartz clarifying that the final season will “pick up a week” after where the Season 7 finale left off.

The CW announced earlier on Sunday that characters from another one of its series, “Black Lightning,” will make their first appearance in the “Arrowverse” by way of the “Crisis on Infinite Earths” crossover coming in the final season of “Arrow.” The “Arrowverse” is a larger shared universe that includes “Arrow,” “The Flash” and “Supergirl.”

Ever since we started talking about doing ‘Crisis,’ and we started talking about it a year ago, the goal has always been, ‘How many different corners of the DC universe can we touch?’” executive producer Marc Guggenheim said. “Obviously, ‘Black Lightning’ just makes so much sense.”

“The whole season is leading up to ‘Crisis’ and the crossover we’ve never done before. And like Stephen said, Season 7 ended our normal structure of how the show’s been, and this year, because we’re leading up to something spectacular, we’re allowed to have huge event episodes, and we’re allowed to bring characters back that we haven’t seen in a while,” Schwartz said. “Each episode is humongous. It’s not like anything we’ve seen on the show before.”

Amell said that he is now coming to terms with the fact that the show is ending.

“It’s been really emotional. Every episode this year feels like we’re trying to put a button on a certain part of the show,” he said. “And I got a chance to work with actors and characters that I haven’t had a chance to work with in a bunch of years.”

“We’ve had a character come to Oliver and say, ‘You’re gonna die,’” Guggenheim said, addressing the ending of the show, which necessitates Oliver’s death. “Whenever I read about this online, people are asking us questions, they’re thinking about things in a very binary way, that the ending will either be X or Y. All I would say is that we have Z planned.”

The eighth and final season of “Arrow” premieres Oct. 15 on The CW.

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