'Arrow' Season 8 may see Oliver Queen relive events in his past as a time loop causes history to repeat itself
'Arrow' Season 8, the final installment of the hit CW series, will be paying tribute to all that's happened on the show in the past, but how it intends to do that is still a bit of a mystery.
Season 8's first episode 'Starling City' will reportedly be paying homage to the show's first season, and its second episode 'Welcome to Hong Kong' will likewise be a tribute to the third season, according to the show's star Stephen Amell who plays Oliver Queen/Green Arrow.
The final trailer for the season that was released on September 24 confirmed that the show will be heavily influenced by the events in the past with shots from Oliver's childhood home and Verdant, the club he used to run with his best friend, Colin Donnell's Tommy Merlyn. The trailer also dropped a hint as we heard Oliver say, "This year is repeating itself," which suggests that the Green Arrow may be stuck in a time loop of some sort.
Images from the season's first episode, 'Starling City', that were released on September 10 featured two returning cast members, Tommy Merlyn and Moira Queen (Susanna Thompson). Considering both characters have been long dead on the show, there's bound to be something weird going on here.
Since Oliver's hometown hasn't been called Starling City in a long time, it seems very likely that there is indeed some sort of time travel involved in at least the first episode. However, we also see Dinah Drake (Juliana Harkavy) and Rene Ramirez (Rick Gonzalez) in the images and those two characters were not introduced till long after Moira and Tommy's deaths, which further complicates matters.
The trailer also shows Oliver looking at a picture of his wife Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards) and their baby daughter Mia Smoak (whose grown-up version is played by Katherine McNamara), confirming that this is indeed the Oliver who left us at the end of Season 7 to help prevent the end of the multiverse.
From what we've seen so far, it looks like Oliver will either be taking a trip through multiple alternate worlds, each based on small but significant changes to the past, or he may be stuck in a time loop that was created by the Monitor (LaMonica Garrett) as a test in order to prepare the hero for the upcoming 'Crisis on Infinite Earths'.
'Arrow' Season 8 will premiere on the CW on October 15.