Arrow Season 6 is officially happening on the CW, and we expect it back in early October.
For those of you who feel that maybe Arrow has been getting lost in the CW superhero shuffle, or that the show might have run its course: think again. ArrowSeason 6 is confirmed, and we have all the details on it right here.
Arrow Season 6 Release Date
One thing to keep in mind about the Arrow Season 6 premiere, is that it will be on a new night and time. Arrow Season 6 will air on Thursday nights instead of the traditional Wednesdays, and at 9 pm after 8 pm. It will follow Supernatural.
The CW hasn't announced the actual date yet, but we expect it will be either October 5 or October 12. We'll let you know as soon as there's official confirmation on that.
Arrow Season 6 Cast
Katie Cassidy will be returning as an Arrow series regular for Arrow Season 6, proving that it pays to act in a TV universe where the multiverse is a thing. (Just ask The Flash's Tom Cavanagh.) That way, if your character is killed off, you can come back as an other-world version of your character.
Given that Cassidy's former series regular character Laurel Lance/Black Canary was brutally killed in Season 4, Cassidy will be returning as Lance's Earth-2 doppelganger Black Siren. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Cassidy will be back for the final two episodes of Arrow Season 5 before returning full-time in Arrow Season 6.
In a statement Arrow co-showrunner Marc Guggenheim said:
One of the things that most excites us about Arrow is that we go where the story takes us. Last year, the story took us to the tragic death of Laurel Lance. This year, our midseason finale reintroduced us to Laurel’s doppelgänger, Black Siren.
We were so taken by Katie’s fearless interpretation of this character that we knew her story was not yet finished. We couldn’t be more thrilled to welcome Katie back to Arrow as Black Siren, though as her appearances on Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow this season show, she never really left the family.
This is an unexpected, interesting choice — though not necessarily a bad one. Though Arrow didn't always know what to do with Cassidy's Laurel in the first few seasons of the show, her Black Canary was one of the better parts of Seasons 3 and 4 and her untimely death felt like a manipulative, contrived way to bring her character's story to an end.
Though Cassidy's return will not mean Laurel's return, she has been a lot of fun to watch on-screen as Black Siren in a role that is arguably a better fit for her. (Cassidy is so good at playing the morally-ambiguous-to-villainous role — see also Gossip Girl and Supernatural.) Her Arrow Season 5 appearance earlier this season was a particular highlight.
The re-introduction of her Black Siren character made Oliver confront his feelings about Laurel's death, as well as forced him to see Black Siren in a new light. "We get to choose what we are. We get to choose who we are. So, tell me, who are you?" Oliver told Earth-2 Laurel, in a particularly thematically-resonant moment.
The Black Siren/Felicity relationship also seems to have a lot of narrative juice left in it, especially given the apparent blurring of Felicity's right-wrong morality line in Season 5 (she wrote, without judgment). Past that, what will Thea think of the return of her dead best friend's doppelganger? (She was at that centuries-long conference the last time Black Siren popped around.) And how will Dinah feel about meeting the doppelganger of her costume predecessor? Diggle no doubt still has lots of guilt around his self-appointed role in Laurel's death.
Basically, the full-time Black Siren could give our characters lots of talk and feel about in Arrow Season 6. Color us intrigued...
Rick Gonzalez (Rene) and Juliana Harkavy (Dinah) have been promoted to series regulars in the upcoming season of the superhero drama. Man, Team Arrow's lair is getting awfully crowded.
Obviously, the basement facility has the room, this is more a curiosity because it really does seem like Arrow is upping its payroll at a time when the ratings don't support the decision. Does this mean that one of the longtime series regulars might be bowing out for Seaso 6? I don't want to be an alarmist here, but I am starting to wonder if one of the members of Original Team Arrow might be killed off at the end of Season 5.
Past that, given that Thea (Willa Holland) has seem a marked decrease in Team Arrow involvement in Season 5 (she has all of those conferences), I wonder if there is a chance that Holland might not come back as a series regular in Season 6, either. Note: this is just speculation. Maybe the Arrow cast will just be ginormous in Season 6.
But I am taking away from the excitement for Rick Gonzalez and Juliana Harkavy, who have both done a great job this season in their respective roles. Rene has been a real source of snarky comic relief within Team Arrow, often acting as the audience surrogate when a long-running member of Team Arrow mentions someone coming back from the dead or a particularly strange metahuman.
And though Dinah has only been part of Team Arrow for a short while, she has already added a new, much needed outsider-as-insider element to Team Arrow. Though she obviuosly cares about the team, she isn't as tied up in the Team Arrow melodrama as other members of the team, giving her some much-needed perspective.
I'm excited to see how Rene and Dinah's roles grow in Season 6.
Arrow Season 6 Flashbacks
But it's possible that ArrowSeason 6 will need a slightly amended format next year. Since the show's inception, it has relied on flashbacks that operate five years in the past to tell Oliver Queen's extended origin story. But with the conclusion of season five, the show will have caught up to its premiere.
So then why is executive producer Marc Guggenheim saying that they're sticking with flashbacks? Well, at least these will have to be a different kind of flashback.
"We’ve totally talked about [flash-forwards] and I don’t rule that out at all,"Mr. Guggenheim told Collider. "But the island story, which is a continuing story unlike the other flashbacks I’ve mentioned, will end in Season 5...one of the things we’ve been saying is that when you go past five years, you have to shake things up and you have to change things around and I think telling a flashback story in five years was always our game, and I’m just excited that we’re sticking to it and I’m excited that it’s a chance to really open the show up next year. One of the things we love doing are those non-island flashbacks stories. We really have always enjoyed them and the fact that we’ll have the room and space to do them, again not every episode but as often as we want to is really enticing."
Watch Arrow on Amazon
The series has found its feet again last year after an uneven fourth season, introducing a new supporting cast of heroes and villains. And really, nobody could have ever guessed that we'd end up with at least six seasons of a Green Arrow TV series, right?
We'll update this with more ArrowSeason 6 news as it becomes available.