Please note SPOILERS!
“It was hard. Every time we kill off a character on the show, it’s always incredibly hard. (…) But as with Tommy’s death, as with Moira’s death, the story implications for this development are so far-reaching for the show and affect all of the characters. We always call it it’s the terrible story math. It kicks off, obviously, a mystery that will drive us for at least the first half of the year. It will set Laurel on a trajectory that she’s never had before on the show. It will create all these other complications and dynamics that I can’t talk about because it would spoil stuff. It buys us a lot of story, and it speaks to all the things that we wanted to do this year in terms of Laurel’s character, in terms of Oliver’s character, in terms of Felicity’s character. It’s always a hard thing to do, but it is really the engine that’s driving the whole third season,” Guggenheim explained.
Sara’s death will definitely affect how Laurel and Oliver interact, and probably not necessarily in the ways that one would expect. “I think Sara’s death probably pulls them closer together than pulls them apart,” Guggenheim said. “That’s not to say there’s not significant moments of conflict between them also. That’s one of the reasons we killed Sara off: the amount of story and richness that we get out of it. There’s a scene in episode 2 where they’re going at it and can’t stand each other. And there’s also a scene in episode 2 where they’re the closest they’ve ever been. And that’s all in the same episode. And it doesn’t feel schizophrenic, it doesn’t feel inconsistent. Every moment feels earned, because of the emotional roller coaster these people are on.”
Credit: GreenArrowTV