Arrow Season 4 Finale: 11 Big Questions That Need Answering

After a rather mixed year, it's time for Season 4 of Arrow to end.

The show has made some improvements from the rather miserable and at times boring Season 3, without coming close to reaching the heights of its acclaimed second season.

It started out with the promise of being a different show, something lighter and more humorous, and in the early goings it looked like it might make good on that without straying too far from its roots: Oliver was happy, there was a happier air around things, but still an emerging threat in the form of Neal McDonough's immediately captivating Damien Darhk.

Sadly it lost its way pretty quickly, and never quite managed to course correct. It wrote itself into a corner by promising that someone would die right from the very first episode, and while the death was of a major character, it came out of a need to kill someone off that they'd brought on themselves, rather than more organic storytelling.

The episodes since then have at least started to raise the stakes though, including a nuke going off, Thea being trapped in a secret utopia and brainwashed, subsequently rescued, and Darhk going full-on magical maniac. Despite Arrow's struggles, it does know how to pull off a satisfying and explosive season finale, and there's reason to expect it can do so again, but it's got a lot to answer as well.

The penultimate episode, Lost in the Flood, ended with Damien Darhk turing up at Felicity's with the intention of forcing her to use her hacking skills for him.

Although Felicity tells him to go to hell, Darhk's powers of persuasion mean she might not be able to stop herself from working from him. Is Darhk going to control Felicity (and presumably Curtis and Donna as well, or at least knock them out) and regain control of Rubicon, or can she find a way of fighting him? And if Darhk does get Rubicon back under his command, what will that mean for the Earth?