Arrow: 5 Things That "The Calm" Did Right (And 3 It Didn't)

2. Sara's Death

Sara Lance was always going to die. In a show in which superpowers do not exist and the dead stay dead, there were only so many times that she could cheat death. With Caity Lotz only ever billed as a guest star and the character only ever known as the Canary (as opposed to the Black Canary of comic lore), Sara's days were numbered from the start. After wrapping up her family drama and her ill-advised romance with Oliver by the final episodes of Season 2, going out in a blaze of glory in the season finale seemed like a fitting end for Sara Lance. But it wasn't the end. Sure, she scampered back to the League of Assassins, but she was alive. Sara could return! When she appeared in the Season 3 premiere, she didn't have a whole lot to do. She helped out Oliver and gave him some non sequitur advice about his social life. She met her sister on a rooftop-as you do-and made some vaguely sinister noises about her purpose in returning to Starling City. It was a shallow reintroduction to the narrative. Just as we got a taste of Daddy Diggle and a taste of Olicity and a taste of some new characters, this was a tiny bit of Sara to tide us over until her time came later in the season. Except that's not what happened. Instead, Sara is greeted by an off-screen antagonist who proceeds to drill three arrows into her abdomen. Fans of the show knew that she was dead. On Arrow, anybody can take one or two arrows to their torsos, but three? Three means death. Still, to make sure that viewers understood that Sara was totally 100% capital-D DEAD, she stumbled backward off of the roof, landed on her back on a dumpster, and flopped headfirst onto the concrete. Sara Lance was always going to die, but the heroine who had fought to protect women and who traded her freedom for the lives of strangers deserved better than falling broken and beaten into the trash.