Melbourne
March 29-30, 2025
Melbourne Showgrounds
It’s funny how easily things can change over the course of a TV show. When Arrow first targeted our airwaves, Oliver Queen’s quest to save his city was a solo mission. However, it didn’t take long for the Emerald Archer to realise that he was nothing without a support team and over the course of the show’s first season, Team Arrow took shape.
The third episode, Lone Gunmen, ended with Oliver’s bodyguard, John Diggle, discovering that Oliver was the vigilante known as ‘The Hood’, and went on to officially join Oliver’s crusade in the following episode. The third episode also introduced a humble Queen Consolidated I.T. employee named Felicity Smoak, whom Oliver went to for help with a bullet-ridden laptop.
It was only supposed to be a one-off character to fill a basic narrative function. After the show’s producers consulted DC’s extensive catalogue of characters, they named the I.T. employee after an obscure supporting character of the superhero Firestorm. Created in 1984, the Felicity Smoak of the comics worked for a big software company, so it made for a nice Easter egg for die-hard comic book readers.
That’s all it should have been. Yet, Melbourne and Gold Coast Supa-Star Emily Bett Rickards brought so much awkward charm and natural humour to the character that she completely stole the show in her brief few minutes on screen. Even the show’s leading man, Stephen Amell seems taken in by her during that first meeting and the chemistry between the pair is instantly recognisable.
Who would have thought that those two minutes of screen time would evolve into one of the show’s main characters, forever changing the lives of both Felicity the character and Emily the actress.
The story goes that Rickards impressed a lot of people with her initial appearance, including showrunners Andrew Kreisberg and Marc Guggenheim, and even Warner Bros. executive, Peter Roth. This led to Felicity becoming a recurring character for the remainder of the first season, with Oliver continually turning to her for tech-related assistance, with increasingly ridiculous cover stories. She was also recruited by Oliver’s step-father, Walter, with investigating some dodgy finances within Queen Consolidated.
For the first half of the season, the intelligent and capable Felicity made it clear that she didn’t buy any of Oliver’s tall tales, but she still didn’t know the truth. That all changed in the show’s fourteenth episode, The Odyssey, when Felicity found ‘The Hood’ bleeding in the back of her car, revealing his identity and asking for her help.
From that point on Felicity became the third member of Team Arrow and quickly proved to be a vital ally, upgrading Oliver’s ramshackle lair with a state-of-the-art computer network and becoming the team’s hacker extraordinaire, eventually taking on the moniker of Overwatch.
By the second season Rickards had been promoted to season regular, and her place as one of Team Arrow’s three founding members was set in stone. She was more than just the team’s computer whiz though, she brought much needed light and humour to balance out Oliver’s tortured past and bloody vision of justice. She balanced out the team perfectly, helping Oliver to keep his humanity, and over the course of the second season there were hints of a budding romance developing between the two.
Just as important is what she brought to the real world – a good, reliable role model for young girls and women. Felicity was an intelligent, technically proficient woman of science, occupying a role that media typically reserves for men. Hackers and tech-support roles in fiction are typically filled by socially awkward, slobby or unhygienic men. In Felicity though, we have an intelligent, funny and well-dressed computer expert, who is respected professionally, while still being lovably awkward.
The character has been praised as a positive role model and representation of women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).
As the seasons progressed, Felicity went through many character arcs and changes. Her on-and-off romance with Oliver became a central focus, with the two running off to live a normal life at the end of season two, only to get drawn back into the vigilante life almost instantly. They got married (almost), broke up and got married again (for real this time), with all manner of rough patches in between.
Meanwhile, she rebuilt herself as quite a businesswoman, first becoming the CEO of her ex-boyfriend’s company, Palmer Tech, before starting her company, Smoak Tech. Her biggest struggle however, came in season four when an attack from the criminal organisation H.I.V.E. left her paralysed from the waist down. This left her wheelchair-bound for some time, but she eventually regained the use of her legs through an experimental spinal chip. Yes, they really started to put poor Felicity through the wringer and the ever-optimistic tech expert began to give way to a more battle-hardened character.
As the series progressed the writers continued to roughen up her character, both in the present, and through surprising additions to her backstory. We learned that while her mother, Donna, was an innocent cocktail waitress in Las Vegas, her father was a supervillain pulled right from the comics – the cyber-criminal known as The Calculator, a.k.a. Noah Kuttler.
When Felicity was a child, Donna had taken her daughter and left Noah due to his criminal actions, but Felicity was led to believe that Noah had walked out on them in order to avoid prison. Years later Noah would reappear to cause trouble for Team Arrow on multiple occasions, opening up old wounds for Felicity in the process.
Despite often using Felicity for his own agenda though, Noah did seem to genuinely care for his daughter and wanted to rebuild a connection with her. Felicity’s relationship with her father was complex to say the least, and his apparent abandonment of her left her with deep-seated issues that weren’t easy to overcome.
It was also revealed that Felicity had been a ‘hacktivist’ while at M.I.T., along with her boyfriend, Cooper, and his roommate. In those days she was vastly different to the blonde, spectacled and professionally dressed woman Team Arrow knew her for. Rather, college Felicity was a black-haired Goth girl with a penchant for making computer viruses.
However, after Cooper took the fall for a hack they’d conducted using her virus, he was arrested by the FBI and eventually died. This rocked Felicity so badly that she gave herself a complete overhaul, drastically changing her look and taking a low-level tech support job at Queen Consolidated upon her graduation.
As is typical for these shows though, her past came back to haunt her in a big way. It turned out that Cooper had actually faked his death and formed the cyber-terrorist group, Brother Eye, seeking vengeance on Felicity for selling out and going straight.
Back in the present, her rocky on-again, off-again relationship with Oliver eventually settled in the ‘on’ position and the two even started a family. Felicity became a stepmother to Oliver’s illegitimate son, William, and even went into witness protection with the boy after Oliver was sent to prison at the end of season six.
After Oliver’s release, the three formed a troubled but loving family unit, with Felicity caring for William as if he were her own, before they shipped him off to boarding school for his own safety. These later years were divisive among Arrow’s fanbase, with even ardent ‘Olicity’ shippers growing increasingly frustrated with the dynamics of their relationship, especially Felicity’s attitude towards Oliver.
However, despite the controversial writing choices, behind every obstacle the pair faced, they were constantly drawn back to each other. Later, after Oliver and Felicity went into hiding at the end of season seven to escape the Ninth Circle terrorist group, Felicity gave birth to their daughter, Mia. In a case of cosmically terrible timing, this was right before Oliver was summoned by the Monitor to uphold his end of a previously made bargain, to help fight in a multiversal Crisis from which he would not return.
This meant that Felicity was absent for most of Arrow’s eighth and final season, as Oliver set about his ordained duties, but her presence was still keenly felt. Oliver tragically died at the end of the epic Crisis on Infinite Earths crossover, sacrificing himself to restart the multiverse and right a great many wrongs.
Felicity did return for the show’s final episode though, bringing closure to her and Oliver’s storyline in the show’s final moments. Here we see a flashforward to 2040, where the Monitor leads Felicity to a portal, warning her that she’ll be never be able to return before leading her through to some sort of afterlife. An afterlife that just happens to look exactly like Oliver’s mum’s old office at Queen Consolidated – the place where Oliver first glimpsed Felicity, years before they actually met (it’s a long story).
The show closes out on a heart-warming reunion between Oliver and Felicity, who now look forward to sharing eternity together.
Felicity became a divisive character during the show’s later years, but there’s no denying just how remarkable she was. Whether or not you’re an ‘Olicity’ shipper, you’ve got to admire how a simple throwaway character who should have only appeared in a single episode, evolved into one of the show’s core characters. Heck, the fact that she evolved to the point of being divisive is remarkable in its own right.
She could have remained an adorably awkward I.T. employee for the show’s entire run, but not only would that have stagnated the character, but fans would probably still have been upset. The character’s direction, decisions and actions may not have sat right with everyone, but hey, that’s called being a fully-rounded human. She was a charming, intelligent, loyal teammate who remade herself as a successful businesswoman and literally learned to walk again.
And yes, she made mistakes and bad calls (we don’t talk about Havenrock), but that’s true of any character in any long-running TV show. So let’s not focus on character choices you might not agree with, but instead celebrate the miraculous evolution of a character, which was completely formed on the back of one actress’ incredible performance.
Emily, you did not fail this (Feli)city.
You can catch Emily Bett Rickards at Supanova in Melbourne (6-7 April) and Supanova on the Gold Coast (13-14 April).
