Joseph David-Jones, the actor who plays Connor Hawke on The CW’s Arrow, has been upped to a series regular for the show’s eighth and final season, according to Deadline.
David-Jones recurred as the popular character last season, where he was seen in the flash-forward sequences to Star City 2040.
David-Jones’ promotion opens up an interesting question about the final season of the Arrowverse’s flagship series: will the show continue to incorporate flash-forwards or will Connor Hawke somehow join Oliver Queen in his mission for the Monitor.
In the final sequence of Arrow’s season 7 finale, the cosmic being the Monitor came to whisk Oliver away from his home with wife, Felicity, and baby, Mia, so he could fulfill his promise to do whatever the multiverse required.
This suggested the 10-episode eighth season of Arrow could be very different from prior seasons. While previous seasons show Oliver’s adventures as the vigilante Green Arrow and his team in Star City, his partnership with the Monitor makes him unavailable to his former allies.
As a result, fans have speculated that Arrow’s final season will function as a set-up for next season’s Arrowverse crossover “Crisis on Infinite Earths.”
David-Jones’ status as a series regular suggests that we’ll be seeing a lot more of him. That could mean the show will still be exploring the current and future workings of Star City after all.
That could mean the series may not diverge as sharply from past seasons as originally expected. We’ll get a better sense of what Arrow’s final season has in store for us when promos start coming out later this summer.
Arrow will air this fall on Tuesdays at 9/8c on The CW.