‘Arrow’ Season 3 Premiere Postmortem: Executive Producer On Shocking Twist

Spoiler Alert! This story contains major plot details from Wednesday’s “Arrow” Season 3 premiere. If you haven’t watched yet, bookmark this link and come back later.

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“Arrow” returned for its Season 3 premiere on Wednesday night, and after an episode packed with explosions, twists, turns, vertigo and surprises, it delivered a major blow, killing off a beloved character – Caity Lotz’s Sara Lance/Canary.

PHOTOS: ‘Arrow’ Season 3, Episode 2 — ‘Sara’

Executive Producer Marc Guggenheim said the idea to kill off Sara came up when they were plotting out Season 3, shortly after wrapping Season 2.

“We just sort of started off talking about — what’s the season about? I’ve spoken at length at this point that it’s about identity and we talked about what Oliver’s journey for the year is gonna be, and we talked about what all the other characters’ journeys would be and just in the course of those story conversations, we had this notion of sort of starting the year off in a way that we typically end the year,” the EP said, after the episode was screened for TV writers.

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“So, it was just part and parcel of our plan for the year ever since we started. … It’s one of the first ideas we kicked around,” he continued. “It was hard. Every time we kill off a character on the show, it’s always incredibly hard. We’re not ‘Game of Thrones,’ we’re not ‘Sons of Anarchy,’ like it’s really, really, really difficult, and especially, by the way, we’re very lucky and I really mean this – our cast and our guest cast are always wonderful people.”

Marc said it was a tough decision to kill off Caity’s character, especially considering how much they enjoy working with the actress.

“We have this great group and a really wonderfully welcoming cast and Caity Lotz completely fit into that family, so it’s always really hard to kill off someone who you just really enjoy working with and you really love writing for and love seeing on the screen, but as with Tommy’s death, as with Moira’s death, the story implications for this development are so far reaching for the show and affect all of the characters,” he continued. “We always call it – it’s the terrible story math and… it kicks off, obviously, a mystery that will drive us for at least the first half of the year. It will set Laurel on a trajectory that she’s never had before on the show. It will create all these other complications and dynamics that I can’t talk about because it would spoil stuff and… it buys us a lot of story and it speaks to all the things that we wanted to do this year in terms of Laurel’s character, in terms of Oliver’s character, in terms of Felicity’s character. It’s always a hard thing to do, but it is really the engine that’s driving, you know, the whole third season.”

Next week’s “Arrow” is titled “Sara,” and Marc said it is “probably our most emotionally gut-wrenching” episode.

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“As it needs to be, as it should be,” he continued, “because this character’s death affects all of the characters on the show. It’s kind of brutal.”

He also noted the episode title has a lot of significance.

“We chose the title, ‘Sara,’ because it actually has a double meaning and I really don’t want to say more than that,” he teased. “And, you know, it’s harsh.”

Sara’s death will send shockwaves through the cast of characters in Starling City, most especially Katie Cassidy’s Laurel.

“There’s the question of what should be done with Sara’s body. There’s the question of, you know, who do they tell — do they tell Lance, for example, that his daughter died a second time? There’s the emotional repercussions for everybody, but it definitely has repercussions for Oliver and Felicity and it has repercussions for Felicity and Ray Palmer, and obviously for Laurel,” he said. “Laurel is very much at the center of that episode.”

Marc said it is one of the series’ best episodes.

“Everything is sort of laid bare and it’s all out there and just — everyone’s raw and naked,” he added. “It was a really hard episode for the cast to shoot, particularly Emily [Bett Rickards], Stephen [Amell] and Caity. … It’s really, really powerful stuff. It’s a hard episode to watch. If you’re prone to tears or capable of crying during watching a TV show, you’ll probably be crying.”

But while Sara is dead, the actress will be on two more episodes this season, so far.

WATCH: Caity Lotz On Landing The Role Of Sara/Canary

“You’re going to see her in [Episode 2 of the season], and then you’re gonna see her in at least a third episode and the truth is… we have stories that involve Caity Lotz and one of the beautiful parts on the show is we do flashbacks and we still want to tell the story of what happened when Sara washed on the shores of Lian Yu… and how she met Nyssa and how she joined the League of Assassins. There’s still a lot of story left to be told with Sara,” Guggenheim said.

“You certainly haven’t seen the last of her,” he added.

“Arrow” airs Wednesday nights at 8/7c on The CW.

— Jolie Lash