While Stephen Amell's Oliver Queen did factor into the Arrow series finale, his story really ended in the Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover. There, he died both as himself and The Spectre, saving his fellow heroes the first time and the entire Multiverse during the second when he created "Earth-Prime."
It was quite the farewell for the Emerald Archer, but Arrow executive producer Marc Guggenheim has now revealed both his "fantasy" and "original conception" for the show's final episode.
As hard as it may be to believe, the original plan was for the Green Arrow's demise to inspire Batman!
"I kind of had a little bit of a fantasy that Oliver would die, and you'd end with some sort of news broadcast talking about his legacy and that would sort of become voice over, and then you would go to this rooftop in a whole other city and on the cuts a thug or some bad guy would come crashing through the frame, having been punched off screen. And this pair of black boots would come down right in front of him, and there'd be a flutter of a scalloped cape, and the voice over would say something along the lines of "Oliver Queen inspired a whole new generation of vigilantes." The implication of course being that he inspired Batman."
Had Arrow been a finite show without all those crossovers, this sort of ending would have worked really well (similar to what we saw in Gotham, for example). However, with the Caped Crusader off limits to The CW and Batwoman establishing that Batman has been M.I.A. for several years now, there's no way things could play out in this way.
An ending like this had the potential to be something really special, though, and knowing that Oliver Queen's time as Green Arrow had brought a vigilante like Batman to Gotham City was a nice touch. Unfortunately, it's also easy to imagine a lot of backlash to this decision as that's not exactly how the Dark Knight's origin goes in the comics books!
What do you guys think about this alternate ending for Arrow?