Arrow Season 4: 9 Characters Who Need To Die

Arrow has come an awful long way since its debut back in 2012, moving from a story about the Hood and his quest to honour his father to a much more expansive world, with far more characters and plots to care about.

Team Arrow has grown from being just the core of Oliver, Felicity, and Diggle, to include a whole roster of vigilantes, and the titular hero himself has gone from being a hooded killer to non-murderous crime-fighter, and is undergoing another marked change by becoming Green Arrow in season 4. 

With such a crowded superhero market on TV, the show needs to continue progressing and evolving, and one surefire way to move things along is death. As with most shows these days, Arrow isn’t afraid of killing off members of its cast, with Tommy Merlyn, Moira Queen, and Sara Lance all biting the bullet (or arrow...or sword). 

This gives it a chance to upset the balance and order of things, to drive new plots, have characters develop, and to introduce new members to the team who can take things in a different direction. 

With a big cast, an established threat of death, and some pretty major villains on the way in Season 4, it stands to reason that we’ll be bidding farewell to at least one character of importance. Either because plot will ultimately necessitate it, or it would simply be beneficial to the show and its audience, these are the characters it should consider killing off. 

To most of the citizens of Starling City, Roy Harper is the Arrow, and more pertinently he is dead. However, a select few members of Team Arrow - and the millions of people who watch the show worldwide - know that he is still very much alive.

He became the hero in Season 3 when he took the blame for being the Arrow, and then faked his own death before leaving town with a new identity. He said an emotional farewell to Thea, and that’s the last we saw of him.

The problem is that while he’s still alive in the show’s universe, there is always the possibility of his return. Unless he’s joining up with the Legends of Tomorrow, it doesn’t seem like a good idea for him to come back. He’s quite a big character and has strong ties to Thea and Oliver and not the sort who just drops by for one episode then disappears again. It’d be like the episode in Season 3 when Slade returned: it was awesome to see Manu Bennett in the role, but ultimately such a fleeting appearance was a disservice to the character.

Roy wasn’t particularly well-served by the writers before his departure, often seeming like a spare-part (admittedly one capable of doing some pretty cool flips) and bringing him back wouldn’t change that. Thus the best thing to do may be to actually kill Roy off for good, removing the possibility of a return, or of people clamouring for him to come back.