On ‘Arrow’ season 5 and a key ‘Legends of Tomorrow’ question mark
There are probably a few questions pertaining to the “Arrow“-verse that we probably spend an unhealthy amount of time focusing on, and one of them probably pertains to the subject of Diggle’s son John Jr., who we first saw during “Legends of Tomorrow” as an adult otherwise known as Connor Hawke, the new Green Arrow. Was this the second child of Diggle’s in the pre-“Flashpoint” timeline, or was this the John that we now have following Barry Allen’s actions? You can argue that the future the Legends saw last season on the show was the future that’s been created now, given that this is, after all, the future.
Yet, at the same time we’ve also seen that the future is a malleable concept, and that things domino based on events from the past. This is what we’re more inclined to believe largely because of the sole fact that we’ve seen it happen on several occasions already — including on “The Flash,” where we saw the newspaper byline change recently so that the article on Barry is no longer written by Iris West-Allen.
Based on what executive producer Marc Guggenheim recently told Entertainment Weekly on the subject, it doesn’t seem like this is something that the writers are necessarily desperate to unravel at the moment:
“We go back and forth on that … That was certainly a notion of ours. It’s hard for me to honestly answer the question without committing to a version of time travel, because in order for that to be the case, then Flashpoint would’ve had to have happened. You start to get into the very, very complicated time travel rules that, quite frankly, I as a writer don’t have an appetite to answer unless we tell a story one day that deals with John Jr., and even then, I don’t know if we would directly address that issue head on. Anyone who watches Legends knows that, by design, we don’t spend a lot of time discussing temporal mechanics — some people like that and it annoys the hell out of other people.”
Ultimately, the easiest solution to this idea is probably just to throw your hands up and say that no matter what the timeline is, John Jr. eventually becomes the Green Arrow either way. There are many things that are like that within this world, and maybe if there are changes that happen from Flashpoint, they are so simple that we didn’t spend enough time with the character to notice.
Both “Arrow” and “Legends of Tomorrow” return to The CW with new episodes in January. (Photo: The CW.)