Arrow: Season 4's first episode ended with a flash-forward six months into the future that showed Oliver Queen standing over a fresh grave. Now, in the 18th episode of the season -- "Eleven-Fifty-Nine" -- we know who is in the coffin.

We were invited to speak with Arrow's producers and cast members about this big development and what it means for Arrow going forward.Warning: this article contains full spoilers for tonight’s episode, so if you don’t want to know who died, read no further!

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A quick recap: Team Arrow tried to stop Damien Darhk’s escape from prison, but they were no match once his powers were restored. Before leaving the scene, Darhk decided to make good on his threat to Quentin Lance -- that he would kill Laurel if Quentin betrayed him -- and he drove an arrow into Black Canary. Despite the hospital doctors’ best efforts, the wound proved fatal, and so Laurel Lance passed away at 11:59, revealing the grim nature of the episode’s title.According to executive producer Marc Guggenheim, they didn't know who would be in the coffin until they decided it later in the season.“Every character, except for the Arrow, is fair game, and we started off this year with the promise of a death and when we sort of worked our way through our various different creative choices, we realized that the thing that will give us the most pop going into the end of the season and going into next season unfortunately would be Laurel,” Guggenheim said.Actress Katie Cassidy said she was sad to leave the cast and crew, but also thought it made sense for the show.“From a creative standpoint, I think that the writers and I always said that since Season 2 up until now, Laurel has had truly an amazing journey and they've written so well for me and I've had such an incredible arc. It made sense to me creatively that Laurel's story has come to an end on Arrow,” Cassidy said. “I think the shock value is good. It gives you such a jolt and it's such a turn in the story that it gives [the writers] so much more to do and places to go with it, otherwise I feel like shows can get stale.”As other shows have proven, killing off characters can have a profound effect on the show’s fan community, and that’s not lost on Guggenheim and his team.“We knew that it would enrage a lot of people. We're not immune to the shipping and we're not immune to the internet controversy -- when I say immune I mean we're not blind to it -- but, you know, we've never made decisions on the show creatively because of the internet," Guggenheim said. "One of the things we knew people would think would be, ‘Oh, in the season where Oliver and Felicity get engaged and Laurel dies, that's clearly making a choice about who's going to end up with who.’ Truth be told, we told the Laurel/Oliver romance story in Season 1, we told that story, we never really thought about going back to it, so the shipping thing was not an element, it was not a factor for us."Comic fans went into the series knowing that the Green Arrow/Black Canary romance is an essential element to Oliver Queen’s story, not unlike Superman/Lois Lane and Spider-Man/Mary Jane. The loss of Black Canary might cause a bit of a shock to them -- something Guggenheim acknowledges. “We recognize that that upsets a lot of fans, particularly the comic book fans. In the comics Dinah Lance and Oliver Queen are, depending on which version of the character you like, in a romance together in various iterations, and that to some people is considered canonical and iconic, and we respect that, but at the same time we've always made no bones about the fact that we are telling our own version of the Green Arrow mythos,” Guggenheim said.“Green Arrow has had so many different interpretations and Black Canary has had so many different interpretations over the years that we never felt beholden to one particular interpretation, and this is our interpretation, like it or not. I recognize there are plenty of people up and down my Twitter feed who do not like it, I totally respect that, but it made the most creative sense for us going forward.”Cassidy was able to tap into her real-life emotions of saying goodbye to the cast and crew when she filmed her death scene.“It's interesting because that scene that you see when I'm in the hospital and I say goodbye, I say to the team 'I never wanted this, I was thinking about giving up the Black Canary and I couldn't do it,' and honestly that scene was so real because it was my saying goodbye to the team and all of us, so it definitely wasn't difficult for me to get to an emotional point. It was hard, but it was very real and I felt like that it was good, that it was genuine and that it was real,” she saidThe loss of Laurel does not mean the loss of Cassidy’s acting talents, however. She will appear on The Flash as her character’s Earth-2 counterpart, the Black Siren. She’ll be reprising her role as Laurel of Earth-1 in Season 2 of Vixen. And it was teased that she’ll be in flashbacks during the next episode, “Canary Cry.”“Quentin's point of view is almost like that of the audience's. In terms of like, 'What the hell is going on around here?' You know what I mean? And all the outrageousness this year with the magic and all this stuff, he can't really take it on as a reality, but if this the result of what's going on, [he] has to deal with it. He can't really accept it, but he has to accept that it is happening,” Blackthorne said. "This death, of course, is just devastating for [Quentin] because this is not the one that was ever supposed to happen. ... He's going to have to pick up the pieces, not pick up a bottle, and reconcile what's left in his life and obviously with that he's got the Arrow family and that'll be where he'll sort of have to find his anchor now from here on in without his beautiful daughter.”