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‘Arrow’s’ Susan Williams is Season 5’s best addition
There’s a lot of new faces in Star City since the beginning of “Arrow” Season 5. Oliver (Stephen Amell), Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards) and Diggle (David Ramsey) have a new team, Mayor Queen is dealing heavily with a new District Attorney (Josh Segarra) and the man in Felicity’s life just happens to be a cop (Tyler Ritter).
Then there’s Susan Williams (Carly Pope), the journalist who could easily ruin Mayor Queen’s credibility with the people of Star City with one report.
Susan has been an interesting addition to “Arrow” this season. While some may want to dismiss her as little more than a possible love interest for Oliver, that would be doing the character and her story a serious disservice.
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First and foremost, Susan is the best example of a journalist the “Arrow”-verse has seen yet. While we love characters like “The Flash’s” Iris West (Candice Patton) and Kara Danvers (Melissa Benoist) on “Supergirl,” both seemed to have somehow stumbled into the job of journalist.
Iris went from from studying in college — it’s unclear if she graduated — to joking about making up fake quotes and launching a blog before she somehow landed a job at Central City Picture News. It’s an interested career trajectory, to say the least. Meanwhile, Kara became a journalist almost entirely because Cat Grant (Calista Flockhart) said she could.
Luckily both of these characters have grown — and in Kara’s case is still growing — into those roles. It’s hard to look past their decidedly non-journalistic roots, though.
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Susan, meanwhile, is a journalist first, doing whatever she can to get to the heart of her story. In the case of “Arrow,” that story is Mayor Queen.
“Susan appears to be up to no good, but, you know, in reality she’s just following a very interesting story,” Amell says of the character. “I mean, the mayor of the town where she is a news reporter was clearly not on an island for five consecutive years, which — by the way, I feel like it’s about time we did that [story]…”
In recent episodes it’s become clear there’s a spark between Oliver and the reporter assigned to the mayor’s office beat — but you can’t help but wonder just how real it is. After all, she’s yet to mention to Oliver exactly how much she knows about his time away from Star City.
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This is what makes her so intriguing. It’s hard to nail Susan down: She’s been shown to be the ruthless reporter but that’s clearly not her only side.
The question is which side will be the dominant one in her personality. Digging deeper and revealing what she’s discovered about Oliver could surely topple his administration — as if hiring an admitted off-the-wagon alcoholic to be deputy mayor shouldn’t have done the trick. Then again, who’s to say that there isn’t something more to Susan, beyond being a person who will do anything for a scoop?
“[I] think that it would be most interesting if Susan Williams wasn’t just necessarily a spy in the weeds, sort of like in the way that there was no redeeming quality in Isabel Rochev. She was there to play Oliver from the beginning,” Amell says. “So maybe Susan Williams is learning something… But concurrently, maybe her relationship with Oliver will become dynamic — and she won’t want to do what she did to Thea in the earlier part of the season.”
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Should that be the case — were Susan to willingly withhold information due to her personal connection to Oliver — what would that say about her as a journalist?
“Arrow” airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on the CW.