The Arrow series finale brings back a lot of dead characters from past seasons, and gives a rather poor explanation for why Earth-1’s Laurel Lance (Katie Cassidy) wasn’t among them. Laurel was killed in Arrow season 4 by Damien Darhk (Neal McDonough), and replaced as the Black Canary by Dinah Drake (Juliana Harkavy). The Arrowverse gained a new Laurel Lance when The Flash introduced her Earth-2 doppelganger, Black Siren, who ended up becoming a key member of Team Arrow and is set to be one of the main characters in Green Arrow and the Canaries.
Laurel is just one name on a long list of important characters to be killed off over the course of the series. Several of these were revealed to be alive in the Arrow series finale, thanks to the actions of Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell), who remade the universe when he became the Spectre in Crisis on Infinite Earths and defeated the Anti-Monitor (LaMonica Garrett). Some of the characters restored by Oliver include his mother Moira (Susanna Thompson), Emiko (Sea Shimooka), Tommy (Colin Donnell), and Quentin (Paul Blackthorne).
Absent from the episode is Earth-1’s Laurel, a fact also noted by Earth-2’s Laurel, who decides to discuss the matter with Quentin. After expressing her confusion over why Oliver brought back everyone but his own Laurel, Quentin explains that perhaps the reason is because Oliver was trying to “fix” the universe. According to Quentin, the Earth-2 version didn’t need fixing, so there was no need to bring back the Earth-1 character. The problem here is that this fails to explain why the original Laurel is still dead in the Arrow series finale. It doesn’t make sense for Oliver to leave one of his closest friends dead only because she now has an adequate replacement.
So why did Arrow find ways to honor several other long-dead characters while at the same time making a conscious decision to leave Laurel behind? Arrowverse producer Marc Guggenheim has admitted that the planned spin-off, Green Arrow and the Canaries, is the real reason why the Earth-1 Laurel didn’t return. They kept the Earth-2 character because this is the one they wanted to use for the new series.
Laurel’s absence from Earth-Prime could have been better received if Arrow had simply offered a better explanation. It could have been said that Laurel stayed dead for the same reason that Robert Queen wasn’t resurrected. Moira believes that Oliver couldn’t bring back the people whose deaths changed him in a meaningful way. It’s possible that this argument could have been made for Laurel. Regardless, it’s unfortunate that the cost of this decision was the life of the show’s most beloved characters, and someone who had one of the most tragic deaths on the show.
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