The perfect happy ending for Arrow may lie in the far distant future of the Green Arrow comics. With the formal announcement that Arrow will be ending after season 8, many are wondering how just the series will come to a close in its final episode and how Oliver Queen’s legacy will continue in the Arrowverse.
Some speculate that Oliver Queen will sacrifice himself to save all reality in the upcoming Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover event. Others think that he may already have done so, bargaining with the Monitor to save the lives of The Flash and Supergirl by giving up his own. The question has also been raised as to what kind of legacy Oliver Queen will leave behind after his passing - a concern that lead actor Stephen Amell has said is the only thing that remains to be addressed regarding Green Arrow after all this time.
The answer may lie in Green Arrow #1,000,000 - a one-shot comic tying into the DC One Million event from 1998. The brainchild of writer Grant Morrison, DC One Million was based around a team-up between the Justice League and their counterparts from the 853rd Century, one million months in the future. The event gave Morrison and other writers the chance to imagine the far future of the DC Comics universe and how the legends and legacies of its heroes might progress in that time.
In the case of Green Arrow and Black Canary, their descendants go on to establish a line of heroes who become the protectors of the Earth itself, as humanity begins to colonize the rest of the solar system and worlds beyond. Rather than being destroyed by war or pollution, the Earth of the 853rd Century is a reborn Eden, where the people live a communal existence in peace with nature, thanks to advanced tesseracts that hide the cities and technology within folded space. The guardians of this Utopia are known as the Green Arrows and they use the skills and techniques pioneered by Oliver Queen millennia earlier, along with advanced trick arrows, to protect the Earth from all those who would do it harm.
It remains to be seen if the Arrow series finale will show a team of future Green Arrows fighting the cyborg gorilla children of Grodd, as Green Arrow #1,000,000 did. However, the idea of showcasing a reborn Earth where a better world is built around the example set by Oliver Queen would be wholly unexpected, given how dour most of the Arrowverse’s alternate futures to date have been. Whatever happens in the finale, it seems likely that when future generations look back on Green Arrow’s life, they will say that he did not fail his city… or his world.
