Felicity Smoak

26 years ago - Felicity Smoak is born in Las Vegas.

20 years ago - 6-year-old Felicity’s parents separate, and her father leaves. With her mother often working to support her, she suffers from abandonment issues, focusing on her computers, a brilliant but lonely kid.

9 years ago - 17-year-old Felicity attends MIT to study software & network engineering

7 years ago - 19-year-old Felicity builds a virus capable of rewriting encryption algorithms in real time, hoping to use it to help make the world better. Her boyfriend Myron Forest uses her algorithm to crash the stock market, and is arrested by the NSA. She tries to confess her role in the crime, but she learns that Myron killed himself in prison, and his last letter to her tells her to let him accept blame for the crime.

6 years ago - 20-year-old Felicity graduates, and becomes a junior programmer at Queen Industries. She is trapped in the building with other hostages by Malcolm Merlyn, but manages to escape and help Oliver Queen save the rest of the hostages. She starts building search algorithms to help Oliver as Green Arrow.

4 years ago - 22-year-old Felicity is approached by Connor Hawke to help set up his new operations. She creates a whole network system for him with multiple headquarters, quickly proving indispensable. She reached out online to Oracle for help with some of the system infrastructure.

2 years ago - 24-year-old Felicity recognizes her virus as the core programming of the Brother Eye AI taking over systems in Star City. She tracks down its creator, discovering that her college boyfriend Myron Forest had faked his death so he could develop Brother Eye in secret. While Connor Hawke & Mia Dearden handle Brother Eye's OMAC equipped soldiers, She is able to hack the AI before it launches itself into a satellite, saving the city. She helps Mia Dearden, Roy Harper & Melanie Wayland stop an attempt to undermine the Star City election with staged violent protests.

now - 26-year-old Felicity works to find the source of the drugs introduced to Star City by new drug kingpin Drakon, who she connects to new police Commissioner Ricardo Diaz. She is able to prove they are the same person.

I know a lot of the people reading this website are writers themselves, so I'm sure this scenerio will be familiar to you. You've created your characters, you have a plan for what your plot will look like, but when you sit down to write a scene, the characters just won't follow your plan. They do other things, they're different people than you expected. Sometimes, out of nowhere, a minor character that you just didn't see coming becomes something way, way more important than you ever imagined, tying the whole world together in a way you never could have imagined but suddenly can't possibly function without. Now about Felicity Smoak...

Felicity Smoak's Television History

The name Felicity Smaok does in fact have it's origins in DC's comic history. She was Ronnie Raymond's dad's girlfriend and eventual wife in the Fury of Firestorm, where she was introduced as a woman whose computer company was wiped out when he accidentally magnetized her building. She was a recurring part of the series but not necessarily a character we'd need to reference. In the meantime, let's talk about the Arrowverse.

When we look back at the CW's expansive universe of DC properties from out perch in 2024, with the benefit of hindsight, we generally remember all the soap opera drama and schlocky Saturday morning cartoon antics. All the way back in 2012, however, Arrow was a brand new show, and it's format was still fresh and fun, and the show's deft recontextualizing of classic DC concepts was part of what made it cool In that environment, one of the many quick character references was an IT employee working at Queen Consolidated that Oliver kept asking for favors named after an obscure character from DC history. She was meant to be a minor character appearing in only a few episodes, but that didn't take into account the casting of Emily Bett Rickards, a Canadian actress making her first appearance on TV, and who just happened to be an absolute charisma supernova. The fanbase fell head over heels for Felicity in her few moments of screen time. On a show that can sometimes be self-serious to the point of parody, Emily's Felicity was sweet, charming, compassionate, brave, adorable, fallible, heroic, and utterly impossible not to love. The series absolutely had to embrace her, making her one of it's most important characters, even abandoning the classic lore of Green Arrow himself to make Felicity his main love interest because how could you possibly not?

Our Felicity Smoak Story

The Arrowverse version of Felicity has actually appeared in comics, most prominently in the Arrow Season 2.5 series written by showrunner Marc Guggenheim, but she's also showed up in the main DC continuity, specifically in the New 52 Green Arrow series. She's introduced as a new ally for Oliver, and is prominently featured in one storyline for five issues before never appearing again. It was not a great series.

We do absolutely want to include Felicity in our timeline; she's just way, way too iconic as part of the Arrow series to ignore, and she also brings a ton of character and utility if we can figure out how to incorporate her without drastically altering the existing character continuity. The answer, we believe, is in the fact that our timeline is featuring the retirement of Oliver Queen, with Connor Hawke becoming a new Green Arrow, building a new crimefighting legacy of his own. Felicity would be a fantastic ally for this new hero, establishing exactly how he is different from his predecessor.

We are going to adapt her story right from her depiction in the TV show, including her lonely childhood, her time in MIT, and even her origin story involving her creation of a hactivist virus that is later used as part of the creation of Brother Eye. In the show, this is another creative recontextualizing of DC history, and it might just set us up to do the same.

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