As a character, Mia remains as intriguing in Armageddon as ever, a unique mix of her father’s stubbornness and her mother’s sarcasm, all topped up with a hefty dose of the sort of deep-seated anger and need to prove herself we don’t often see in female heroes. She’s fascinating to watch and one has to hope that this return might presage a few more appearances in this universe, either on The Flash or one of its other shows.
“Mia has simultaneously changed and also remains largely the same. She loves to dig in her heels,” McNamara laughs when asked how the past two years have altered her character. “The writers did such an amazing job of picking up right where we left off with her.”
Though the Green Arrow and the Canaries series so many of us (read: me) wanted to see was not to be, Mia’s story still has a lot of “unfinished business,” according to McNamara, including the disappearance of her half-brother William, her lingering, largely unprocessed anger toward both her parents, and her anxieties surrounding what it means that she’s chosen to pick up her father’s bow and carry on his legacy.
“There were a lot of unresolved things when Oliver died—for many people and many of these characters, but also for [the idea of] the Green Arrow itself,” McNamara says. “And I think we get to see a glimpse of Mia trying to fill those shoes, and trying to fill that gap. And as we see in in the scenes between Black Lightning and [Barry] – to fill that chair that’s still empty. And she’s not quite earned it yet and she’s not quite figured out how to do it yet.”
The Flash touches on all of those still-dangling plot and emotional threads, seeing Mia arrive in 2021 in pursuit of Thawne, mistakenly assuming that his temporal energy trail was somehow connected to her still-missing brother. But she becomes embroiled in the debate about whether to allow Thawne to be permanently erased from the timeline—ultimately a lesson about choosing to be a hero that the mercurial Queen daughter desperately needs to hear after two fruitless years of searching for William.
“She’s still dealing with this struggle of taking on the mantle of the Green Arrow and not feeling as though she’s worthy of it and feeling as though she’s failing a lot of the promises she made to her parents before they disappeared,” McNamara says. “And the fact that William is still missing, the fact that she’s become obsessed with trying to remedy these failures—it’s really put her on a precipice and she’s [asking herself] what will I sacrifice and where will I draw the line to achieve what I am going after?”
