WARNING: This article contains major spoilers for "Purgatory," the latest episode of Arrow Season 8.
At the end of Arrow's Season 7, series mainstay Felicity Smoak departed, leaving Oliver Queen alone as he went on a mission to help the Monitor prepare for the upcoming "Crisis on Infinite Earths." Though Oliver started this new quest solo, it wasn't long before he was surrounded by his team again as Diggle, his children Mia and William and Earth-2 Laurel, now referred to as Black Canary, all eventually joined the Green Arrow in his mission. And while the series is still very much a vehicle for all of Team Arrow, fans might have noticed that, in this final season, Oliver and Laurel have spent more time together than nearly, well, ever.
In fact, in the series' last few episodes, Arrow has gone to great lengths to pair the two together. The duo has now fought side-by-side and shared the screen more than the original Laurel and Oliver ever did. And now that Laurel is truly the Black Canary, it seems, before its end, Arrow is finally giving fans a taste of the Green Arrow and Black Canary team-up they have longed for since the start of the series all those years ago.
When Arrow kicked off in 2012, it seemed apparent that the series was building to a classic Green Arrow/Black Canary duo. After all, Oliver and Laurel already had a complicated love story that seemed to be on the mend, and it was established that the benevolent lawyer had fighting skills that were destined to become more refined. However, as the series evolved, the trajectories of character arcs changed. Laurel did eventually become the Black Canary, but she never became the skilled vigilante fans hoped for. What's more, Oliver's burgeoning romance with Felicity also further separated the two heroes.
Following the death of Laurel in Season 4, the emergence of a new Black Canary in Dinah Drake and the arrival of a redemptive Earth-2 Laurel made it seem that fans may never get the proper team-up they know from the comics. And while that remains true in a certain aspect, Arrow's final season has taken a few strides in that regard by often teaming up Oliver and Laurel during their most recent missions. The result is a simple taste of what fans always wanted to see: Green Arrow and Black Canary, working together to take on the bad guys.
Setting aside the love story aspect of their relationship, the show's latest episodes have gone to great lengths to bring Oliver and Laurel together. In "Reset," the two characters were trapped in a time-loop by the Monitor, and they spent the better part of the episode working together to find a way out. Similarly, in this week's episode, "Purgatory," Oliver and his team were all united on Lian Yu. But when it came time to split the group up, Oliver and Laurel teamed-up for their own side-quest that saw them, once again, fighting side-by-side.
Unfortunately, this brief tease is likely all fans are going to get. After all, Arrow will only have two episodes after the "Crisis on Infinite Earths" crossover concludes. And while Laurel will continue to fight crime in the spinoff series Green Arrow and the Canaries, this event will see the end for Oliver Queen. Perhaps fans should be thankful that Arrow finally provided them with a brief glimpse of what they have always clamored to see.
Airing Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on The CW, Arrow's final season stars Stephen Amell as Oliver Queen, David Ramsey as John Diggle, Rick Gonzalez as Wild Dog, Juliana Harkavy as Black Canary, Katie Cassidy as Black Siren, Katherine McNamara as Mia Smoak, Joseph David-Jones as Connor Hawke and Ben Lewis as William Clayton-Queen.