Dammit, Arrow. You better be worth all the playing you’re doing with my emotions. It seems now every secondary character you reference as having included in the show now turns out to be one of the DC universe’s more obscure kickass ladies. I mean, first you included a character named after Black Canary’s civilian identity. Then you announced that the Huntress will definitely be on the show. Now, you’re saying that you’ve got long term plans that may culminate in the inclusion of Speedy, Green Arrow’s traditional teenage sidekick.
And not even Roy Harper, the original Speedy! You want to include a female Speedy, like Mia Dearden!
According to MTV Splash Page, we’ll be seeing references to the eventual destiny of Thea Queen, Oliver’s (Green Arrow’s) younger sister starting as early as the first episode.
In the “Arrow” pilot, Queen refers to his younger sister as “Speedy,” an Easter egg that could easily get lost in the shuffle of an already jam-packed episode. But executive producers Marc Guggenheim and Andrew Kreisberg didn’t make the reference just for the reference’s sake. In fact, there’s an early version of the pilot that further teased Thea Queen’s eventual assumption of the Speedy mantle.
“My favorite moment in the original script, which Andrew wrote, that didn’t make it into the pilot is when she’s in the room with [her friend] and they’re crushing up the pills,” Guggenheim told TV Guide. “The original stage direction was she reaches over to the shelf and grabs a junior archery championship trophy to crush the pills. I’m like ‘Why didn’t we do that? We never should have taken that out!'”
Drug use and addiction is nothing new to Speedy’s character. In the seventies, Roy Harper, the original Speedy, was part of an award winning, socially concious anti-drug story where Green Arrow was confronted with the result of his own terrible parenting when he discovered that Roy had become a heroine addict. Decades later, Mia Dearden was a teenage runaway from an abusive home who was entrapped in a child prostitution ring, petitioning Green Arrow to become his sidekick after he rescued her, eventually taking on the mantle of Speedy, joining the Teen Titans, and fighting crime despite the discovery of her HIV positive status. Mia, though she does not appear in the New 52, remains probably the most prominent (if not the only) HIV positive superhero at DC or Marvel.
How much of her origin and characteristics will be incorporated when and if Thea Queen becomes Speedy? No way to tell, but I’ll make a deal with you, Arrow. If you come out, and you’re good, I’ll watch you. Sound reasonable?
(via MTV Splash Page.)
