'Arrow' finale's last scene gives Oliver and Felicity a perfect reunion and resolves Season 7 cliffhanger
This article contains spoilers for 'Arrow' Season 8 Episode 10 'Fadeout'
After Emily Bett Rickards, who played Felicity Smoak on 'Arrow', left the show after Season 7, fans have been eagerly waiting for her return. She was sorely missed throughout Season 8 but the season and the series finale finally brought her back for the perfect goodbye that also coincidentally resolves the cliffhanger at the end of Season 7.
In Season 7, the version of Felicity from the year 2040 leaves with the Monitor / Mar Novu (LaMonica Garrett) to meet her lost husband Oliver Queen / Green Arrow (Stephen Amell) and that was the last we saw of her (till now). It was believed that the cosmic being would bring her to Oliver on his deathbed during 'Crisis on Infinite Earths' so as to ease his passing but that's not what happened.
Back in 2019, we had speculated that 'Crisis' could give Oliver and Felicity their happy ending by sending them to a paradise dimension of some form. That's more or less what happens in the finale, though the place they go to is revealed to be the afterlife and not some run-of-the-mill pocket dimension.
In the scene, we go back to when Felicity stepped through the Monitor's portal to meet Oliver and see her emerge in the top floor office of Queen Consolidated, the place where Oliver saw Felicity for the first time in a Season 3 flashback. Not only was it touching to find out that Oliver's idea of heaven is the first time he saw Felicity but it also gave them the perfect place to spend all eternity in each other's loving embrace.
"I meditate every morning," executive producer Marc Guggenheim explained at a press screening, according to TVLine. "And this one morning, I came out of the meditation with the entire scene in my head, like literally word-for-word exactly (what) you just watched it… This has never happened to me before."
At the time, the showrunners didn't know if Rickards would be open to returning for the role. But it's a good thing she did because now that the finale is here, we can't think of a better way this story could have ended.
"We didn’t even think of another ending," Guggenheim's fellow EP Beth Schwartz admitted. "We didn't have a backup plan at all. We were just like, 'Emily needs to do this,' and luckily she did."
The final episode of 'Arrow' aired on The CW on January 28.