5 Reasons The Death Of [SPOILER] Is ‘Arrow’s Biggest Loss

5: No Dedicated Storyline In Season 4

One of the issues that I have had with Laurel’s journey on Arrow in the past two seasons is that the usage of her character was inconsistent and most of the time, she was underutilized. It’s always a challenge with ensemble shows when you have to figure out how you can give all of your main characters an equal amount of focus throughout 22-23 episode seasons. It’s understandable that some players may not be used a lot at first in the first few episodes of a new season and is then put to use a lot more in the second half of the seasons. However with Laurel, it never felt like we got that and it can be said for her role in Season 4. She was given a storyline for a few episodes at the start of the year with the return of Sara Lance a.k.a. the White Canary (Caity Lotz). The problem with that is that she was only serving a role that was to setup and benefit Sara as she was getting ready to take off for DC’s Legends of Tomorrow.

We haven’t seen Sara’s return from the dead really play into anything with Laurel’s life since then and that is why I can’t count it, even though Sara isn’t in Star City at the moment as she is off with her time traveling friends. There is a difference in having a storyline and then being part of one, but just serving a role that supports someone else’s character. The last few weeks, as Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) was dealing with the drama in his life, she was there as moral support as these two have a deep history and their friendship was just starting to be repaired after episode 5 “Haunted” this season. We got to see her back as a lawyer in episode 16 when she was the prosecutor for Damien Darhk’s (Neal McDonough) trial, but that was the first time in a very long time that we got to see her in her daytime job. With the decision to kill her off, as much as I disagree with it, it would have been appreciated if Laurel had been given more dedicated time this season before she was killed. Unfortunately that isn’t what we got, hence why the death was heartbreaking while at the same time a disservice.