There are just five episodes left to go in The Flash’s final season, and while the series will take a few weeks off after airing this week’s episode, titled “Partners in Time,” the one after that is set to be an especially big deal. “It’s My Party and I’ll Die If I Want To” is bringing back some familiar Arrowverse faces, including Stephen Smell’s Oliver Queen, a.k.a. Green Arrow, who hasn’t been seen on the small screen since Arrow concluded in 2020. Now we finally know why Oliver will be brought back into play for this episode of The Flash.
The basic premise for “It’s My Party and I’ll Die If I Want To” has been established thanks to the trailer shared by TVLine. A surprise birthday party is held for Grant Gustin’s Barry Allen, and among those in attendance are David Ramsey’s John Diggle and Keiynan Lonsdale’s Wally West, the latter of whom hasn’t appeared on The Flash since Season 6. Diggle gives Barry Oliver Queen’s bow as a present, but the party comes quickly crashing to a halt afterwards when the attendees start falling unconscious.
The person responsible for this is Sendhil Ramamurthy’s Ramsay Rosso, a.k.a. Bloodwork, who was the main antagonist in the first half of The Flash Season 6 and we’ve known would be back for Season 9 since last summer. Bloodwork crashed the party because he’s aware that the events of “Crisis on Infinite Earths” produced a new multiverse thanks to Oliver Queen’s actions as The Spectre, and now he has some scheme in motion that puts these other realities in danger. In order to stop him, Barry will need to team up with Oliver, and this trailer clarifies that this is the version of Stephen Amell’s character from the afterlife, rather than a past version of him, a doppelgänger from another Earth, etc.
After reuniting on with each other on Lian Yu, a location near and dear to Oliver Queen’s heart (though I suspect this is a simulation of the island rather than the real deal), he and Barry Allen will need to team up to stop Bloodwork, who has used his creepy abilities to once again possess people, including some of Barry’s allies. While it’s unclear exactly what Bloodwork is hoping to specifically accomplish in “It’s My Party and I’ll Die If I Want To,” it ties back to his greater goal of trying to eliminate death as a concern in everyday life. This time around though, his actions affect the rest of the multiverse, and this is bad enough that Oliver has to personally get involved.
Shortly after it was announced that Stephen Amell would guest star in one of The Flash’s final episodes, the actor shared that he didn’t even need to hear Greg Berlanti’s pitch for bringing Oliver Queen back, as he was already game to do it. That said, Amell later shared that he made a specific request for his character, though we don’t know what it was, so hopefully he sheds light on that after the episode airs. At the beginning of March, Amell shared a sweet behind-the-scenes photo of himself alongside Grant Gustin, and since this will likely be the last time we see these two paired together in the Arrowverse, fans of Arrow and The Flash should get ready to experience all kinds of emotions.
“It’s My Party and I’ll Die If I Want To” airs Wednesday, April 26 at 8 pm ET. Keep track of other programming with our 2023 TV schedule, and remember that you can stream all of Arrow and past seasons of The Flash with a Netflix subscription.
