'Arrow' EP Andrew Kreisberg Previews Tonight's 'Game-Changing' Season Finale! (JJJ Interview)

After last week’s breakneck penultimate episode of Arrow, we can’t imagine how epic tonight’s (May 14) season two finale will be!

JJJ caught up with Executive Producer Andrew Kreisberg who gave us the scoop on the brewing Starling City battle, including a possible death and yes – a major Olicity moment!

In tonight’s episode, titled “Unthinkable,” Slade (Manu Bennett) moves forward with his plan to kill one more person in Oliver’s (Stephen Amell) life.

While Oliver has fought all year to be more than the killer he once was, when Slade kidnaps someone close to Oliver’s heart, Oliver is pushed to the edge and realizes sometimes it takes doing the unthinkable to stop the monster.

The season two finale of Arrow airs TONIGHT, May 14 @ 8PM on The CW!

JustJaredJr: Let’s talk those shots at the end first. Whether Malcolm lives or dies, Thea has already been in a dark place lately. How will this interaction with her father affect her going forward?

Andrew Kreisberg: I think Thea has a choice to make. She needs to decide who she wants to be and what she wants to be. And whether she still wants to be Thea Queen because in a way, Malcolm is saying, “You can be Thea Merlyn.” I think the choice Thea makes is going to surprise the hell out of people.

Click inside to read the rest of our interview about tonight’s episode…

JustJaredJr.com Interview – Andrew Kreisberg

JJJ: We saw Roy get the cure, but what kind of lasting effects will his actions this past season have on him heading into next season?

AK: With Roy, we always say that if someone is going to take a step toward becoming their comic book self, they have to go to the island. And we don’t mean that literally, but we do mean that they have to go through their sort of Crucible and come out the other side. For Roy, this season really has been his Crucible. You’re going to see Roy take his first steps toward the destiny I think the audience wants for him. And that he wants for himself.

JJJ: We’re leading up to this big battle in the finale, where we see all of our characters sort of come together for one cause. What can you tease about that?

AK: Someone says in the finale, “When you’re facing an army, you need an army to fight them. And Slade has his 50 super-powered Mirakuru soliders who are wreaking havoc. It’s going to take more than Oliver, Felicity, and Dig to take them on. We discover early on, that’s where Sara went when she said “I need to go see a friend.” She went to go see Nyssa to get her to help fight back. So Nyssa has a coterie of League of Assassins members and the question is – is Oliver going to be willing to work with killers – especially because his agenda for the year has been to stop killing. Whether Oliver is able to pull that off is the central question of the finale.

JJJ: I really loved the scene last week when Laurel picked up that bow. And I think we saw a major sense of pride when she saw Sara rescue the kid from the building. Any chance we’ll see Laurel go into training and maybe join Team Arrow sometime in the future?

AK: Not specifically in those terms. From the very beginning, Laurel has been on a journey. From our perspective, a very clean and clear one. I know not everyone has always been supportive of the choices we’ve made, and we’ll leave the audience to debate whether they were the right or wrong choices, but we really feel like Laurel is getting to a place that most people in the audience will be happy with. How about if I leave it at that?

JJJ: Sounds good! I love that the show doesn’t really take Oliver’s secret past the point of unrealistic, which was even more evident when we found out Moira knew all along. How and when do you decide that a character should know he’s the Arrow?

AK: It’s always been our experience that whenever someone finds out, they become much more interesting, both the actor and in the writing. And that was certainly the case with Tommy. Once Tommy found out, writing him, it just made all the scenes between him and Oliver so much more super charged. This season, we sort of felt the same thing with Laurel. The least interesting aspect of the show is to write someone saying, “Oliver, Oliver. You just missed the Green Arrow. He just left here. Where were you?” So much of that feels very – and no disrespect because it was my favorite show (laughs) – but it just felt very 60s Batman to us. Once anyone, a civilian, finds out, it brings them into the action and you have much deeper and richer conversation amongst the characters. Again, in season one it was Felicity and Tommy. And in season two, it’s been Roy and Laurel. Not everybody knows now, and some people will find out in season three, and some people won’t. But in a show like this, it’s one of the most exciting changes you can make to the inherent structure. So whenever it is made, it’s sort of like a shot of adrenaline that the writers and actors really appreciate.

JJJ: Do you think more people knowing helps or hinders him?

AK: That’s an interesting question. I never really thought about it. I think it does help. One of the things Oliver’s learned over the course of this season is that secrets are not his best friend and the more secrets you keep from people, that harder it is to have a real relationship with them. When people find out and he’s able to rely on them in a much more true manner. It just makes his relationships with those people stronger. So moving forward, Oliver having his allies in his quest, he doesn’t have to feel so alone and isolated. I think being alone and isolated in the beginning allowed him to sort of lack a true moral compass. He thought he was doing good, but essentially he was just killing people on this list. With the addition of Dig, and the addition of Nyssa and Sara and Roy, and now Laurel, all of these people are allowing him to not be so isolated, and allowing him to vent his frustrations and his fears and his anger to be a much better hero.

JJJ: And we have to ask about Felicity and Oliver’s relationship, of course. That scene last week between them�wow, Emily killed it. We know she gets taken in the finale. Not that it’s lost on him, but does that serve to remind Oliver how important she is to him?

AK: I think there’s probably the most Olicitiest Olicity moment in the finale. Fans of Emily Bett Rickards, which includes Marc [Guggenheim] and myself, are not going to be disappointed in the events of the finale.

JJJ: Any chance we’ll get more of her backstory next season?

AK: Yes. We’ve always talked about getting to meet Felicity’s family. It was something we discussed and we tried to do at the end of this season. But we just felt that we couldn’t ever find the right place for it. Once Slade came into the picture, it was very hard for us to have – what we would call – a sort of “lighter” B-Story. Because at any given moment, any one of them could have been killed. So from episode 15 on, you probably noticed that there weren’t too many side stories that were lighthearted. But hopefully, in the beginning of season three when things are quite so turbo-charged emotionally, danger-wise, we can do something like that. Because we’re all champions of it.

JJJ: Anything else you can tease about the finale? We hear someone dies. Can you confirm anything about that?

AK: I can confirm that Oliver does not die (laughs). No, I’ll just say that the finale is a fitting conclusion to season two, while at the same time, there’s a great deal of set-up for season three. There’s certainly a game-changing moment at the end that I don’t think people will see coming. No one dies lightly on our show. I think that’s one of the reasons the show is so emotional resonant, given that there are people with masks running around shooting bows and arrows at one another. The stakes are very real. The occasional deaths on the show serve to remind us and the audience that they’re playing for keeps, and anyone on the show is in danger of losing their lives.