Everything You Need to Know About the Arrow Season 3 Premiere!

An Olicity kiss! Roy suits up! Daddy Diggle! Executive producer Marc Guggenheim spills season 3 secrets

By Sydney Bucksbaum Oct 08, 2014 3:00 PMTags
Arrow PromoCW

All Arrow fans can agree on one thing: Oliver (Stephen Amell) and Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards) have sizzlin' hot chemistry!

The fans know it, the actors know it, and even the showrunners know it, because in the Arrow season three premiere—airing tonight—Oliver and Felicity are finally giving in to whatever they have between them and are going on a date.

A real, date-date, complete with fancy clothes, a classy restaurant...and a kiss!

Okay, so the actual date might not end in a kiss, but Olicity will kiss at some point during the premiere, and it. Is. Hot.

Cate Cameron/The CW

After screening the episode early (try to contain your jealousy), we took our burning season three questions straight to executive producer Marc Guggenheim and he spilled some major scoop about what's coming up on the CW hit show.

Here's everything you need to know about season three—including all the Olicity scoop you could ever want!

1. Olicity, Olicity, Olicity! "Oh god, I've been teasing [Olicity fans] mercilessly on Twitter," Guggenheim said with a laugh. "I like to say it's an explosive first date. I think it's so hard to tease it without spoiling it, but I'm very happy with the circumstances under which they have their first kiss. I hope it's unexpected. I hope it plays as emotional." Oh yes, we can confirm it definitely does.

2. The premiere has finale amounts of drama, action, and shocking twists and turns. "Every season we spend what really should be our hiatus and what really should be me relaxing on a beach planning out the whole season," Guggenheim said. "It's what we did in season one and what we did in season two and we did the same process in season three. We just started off talking about what's the season about—I've spoken at length at this point about that it's about identity—and we talked about what Oliver's journey for the year is going to 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 starting the year off in the way that we typically end the year."

CW

3. If you haven't watched Arrow in the past, now's a great time to start! "I feel like this episode's a really good jumping-off point for new viewers," Guggenheim said. "We sort of closed a chapter at the end of season two, and this is a brand new opening. I don't really think there's anything you really need to know coming into it. It's pretty new-viewer friendly. That wasn't necessarily by design, it just happened to work out that way because of the story we were telling."

4. Diggle's (David Ramsey) about to become a dad. If you thought Oliver's bodyguard-turned-partner-in-fighting-crime was already swoon-worthy, just you wait and see how he's handling impending fatherhood. He and Lyla (Audrey Anderson) are going to make some seriously protective and loving parents.

5. Vertigo's making a comeback...with a twist. Just because we've seen the last of Seth Gabel's Count Vertigo doesn't mean the drug is off the streets of Starling City. Peter Stormare plays a street thug peddling a new version of Vertigo in the premiere, and it makes users hallucinate their worst fears. But before you ask, unfortunately any similarities to Batman Begins is a "total coincidence."

"Its presence in [episode] 301 was really designed to get at that theme that Oliver is struggling with this theme of identity," Guggenheim explained. "We certainly talked about that in the writers' room, 'Are people going to think we're doing the same thing as Batman Begins?' But ultimately for us, character and theme trump everything else and we're like no we're doing our own thing. If we were connecting it to Ra's it would be very Batman Begins, but they're very separate."

Cate Cameron/The CW

6. Roy's (Colton Haynes) suiting up as Arsenal. Roy is officially part of Team Arrow in a way he never has been before. "That's a big component of this season," Guggenheim said. "I was very happy with season two, but one of the things I think we dropped the ball on a little bit was in [episode] 212 we made a big deal about Roy joining the team and then didn't get a chance to do that much with him because we were pushing a lot of other story. One of the fun things about season three is we really get to play with that. You really feel like Roy is a part of Team Arrow, that it's more than just wearing a costume, that he's really present and a member of this group, that the trio becomes a quartet."

He continued, "That's definitely true in episode 6. Episode 6 is a very Roy-centric episode. It speaks in some ways to episode 212. I wouldn't call it a sequel, but they are thematically related and they will feel very similar. Roy being a part of the team is an important part of Roy's development."

7. Roy and Oliver will be working side-by-side. "[Roy] is pretty much fine being a part of the team as he is," Guggenheim said. "We certainly played that notion of Roy not trusting Oliver's judgment in [episode] 218. I think what you see in season three is much more a mentor/mentee, master/apprentice kind of relationship, which is, again, what we were setting up in [episode] 212 and didn't fully realize. It's more fully realized in season three. You really see how Oliver is training this kid to be a hero in his own right."

8. Ray Palmer (Brandon Routh) is staying super-sized. Even though comic book fans know Ray becomes The Atom, don't expect to see a pint-sized Routh on Arrow. "Anything is possible," Guggenheim hedged. "My instinct is if Ray Palmer is going to shrink he'll probably shrink on another show. With The Flash in existence, there's really no compelling reason for us to do superpowers on Arrow, because we can bring characters to Flash to have superpowers. We have plans for Ray that don't involve shrinking but our plans for Ray are actually really cool."

Arrow season three premieres tonight at 8 p.m. on the CW.