With CW’s Arrow ending next year in a shortened eighth season, at least one of the series’ original stars will not be coming back for the final season. Emily Bett Rickards, who plays the team’s tech leader and now Oliver Queen’s wife, has announced through her Instagram that she will be exiting the show at the end of the current season.
Introduced early on in Arrow‘s first season, Felicity Smoak was an original character created for the show, but quickly became a popular character that cultivated a fanbase of her own for her quirky personality and chemistry with Stephen Amell’s Oliver. It was during the show’s third season that Felicity replaced Laurel Lance, aka Black Canary, as Oliver’s main love interest, a pairing fans have dubbed ‘Olicity’. Despite the popularity of Olicity, it has been a decision derided by many Green Arrow and Black Canary fans.
Despite leaving the show prematurely, Felicity’s fate is all but assured as the current season of Arrow has been doing flashforwards to the future instead of the previous flashbacks. A recent episode has established the character is alive, but remains in hiding as she has plans to apparently destroy Star City.
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Arrow was the first of the CW’s shows to launch the Arrowverse, first with The Flash and followed by DC’s Legends of Tomorrow and Supergirl. The series have had an annual crossover every December with this year’s set to be Crisis on Infinite Earths, a universe-spanning conflict that re-shaped the DC Universe.