'Arrow' Season 8 premiere flash-forward reveal the 2040 team off to a shaky start as they struggle to work together as a unit
Season 7 of 'Arrow' introduced audiences to the dismal future of Star City in the year 2040 where Mia Smoak (Katherine McNamara), Connor Hawke (Joseph David-Jones), William Clayton (Ben Lewis), and Zoe Ramirez (Andrea Sixtos) are brought together as the new incarnation of Team Arrow. At the end of the last season, this ragtag group of heroes was tasked with protecting the city by Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards), Roy Harper (Colton Haynes), and Dinah Drake (Juliana Harkavy) and in Season 8's first episode we see that the hero gig isn't going as well as they'd hoped.
In the episode 'Starling City', we catch up with the team while they are at a fundraiser for the City Reunification project, providing security for the host, a certain Mr. Vasquez. Thanks to Mia getting momentarily distracted, John "JJ" Diggle Jr. (Charlie Barnett) and his Deathstroke Gang manage to kidnap Vasquez and escape.
Under Connor's leadership, the team tries to stage an attempt to rescue Vasquez by taking the Deathstroke Gang head-on but JJ proves to be too much for Mia to handle and he manages to escape, leaving Vasquez beaten bloody and declaring that he owns the city now. Connor seems genuinely shocked (and a little hurt) that his plan to distract his brother by offering himself up as bait didn't work and he apologizes profusely to Mia but the young woman decides to take over leadership of the team, declaring that "from now on, we're going to do things my way."
David-Jones had told us earlier in an interview that the future Team Arrow is going to have a bit of trouble finding their feet as heroes and we see this pretty clearly in the episode. Mia isn't used to working with other people and she has trouble trusting Connor's judgment when it comes to his brother, which makes it difficult for them to function well as a team though William is confident that these "growing pains" are just something they'll have to get through before they become a proper unit.
'Arrow' Season 8's second episode 'Welcome to Hong Kong' will air on the CW October 22.
