How Felicity Smoak Set the Stage For ‘Supergirl’

Supergirl wouldn’t exist without Felicity Smoak.

Let me back up a bit. Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards) appears on Arrow, the first show in showrunner Greg Berlanti’s DC universe. When first watching Arrow, the heavy nature of the series threatened to outweigh the fun of watching. The show’s intriguing story still felt like it was going through the motions, coasting on the grimdark tone rather than the depth of the characters.

So when Felicity Smoak stammers awkwardly in her first scene with Oliver Queen, it throws off the entire balance of the scene – in a good way. Suddenly all the gruff and grimness felt…a little melodramatic. Really, Oliver, are you going to ask the IT girl at your company for help with the drug ring you’re going after by passing it off as an energy drink venture? Do all your relationships with your family and friends have to be shot through with so much tragedy? Be honest – do you have to kill everyone? Felicity herself raises these questions, both in her presence and, well, actually asking them. Felicity is unique because she feels like a real person, and a real person would ask all those questions.

Felicity becomes a regular on the show soon after she saves Oliver when he has no one else to turn to for help when he gets shot by his mom (oh, so that’s why he has such a tragic relationship with his family). After that, she provides the tech and information side of the team, but not to act in revenge or an abstract sense of justice like Oliver and his bodyguard Diggle do – but to find and rescue Oliver’s stepfather and her boss, because, as she says, “He was nice to me.”

By being someone guided by, and relying on, a sense of compassion and intelligence rather than revenge or redemption, Felicity Smoak’s guest role blooms into the indispensable moral center of the show. She’s almost like an audience conduit – like the Doctor’s companions in Doctor Who – her presence providing the characters a depth and connection to the audience that they didn’t have before. Oliver and Diggle make jokes, they open up about their feelings and motivations, and feel more authentic when they interact with her, as her primary characterization is authenticity. Even her life and past outside the story – of someone who’s been building computers since she was 7 and went to MIT, but seems resigned to being an IT girl – gives her a fascinating background of unrealized potential. She seems not only worthy but essential to their crime-fighting team. With her, Arrow becomes less and less about Oliver Queen stumbling around for revenge based on a notebook and more about a team working to find justice.

While Felicity Smoak was one character spotlighting the cracks in superhero tropes, Supergirl extends this self-awareness through its metanarrative of how strong, complex women are often boiled down to one aspect of themselves. The show’s most fascinating creation is the multifaceted media giant Cat Grant, Kara’s boss, who brands Supergirl and critiques the superhero’s public image.

Supergirl carries on the Smoak legacy with its unique self-awareness and focus on what makes Kara Zor-El (Melissa Benoist) human rather than alien: her personal relationships with her family, her friends, and her work, both as Kara and as Supergirl. Kara in turn is an interesting look at Felicity Smoak’s character because Kara, like Felicity, is the character the audience is meant to relate to – she’s just the one with superpowers this time.

Ultimately, Kara, like Felicity Smoak, is striving to be authentic. She, too, has unrealized potential and wants to do good in the world, but is unsure and unable as to how. For her, becoming a superhero is not just a plot device, but character development.

Moreover, unlike most superhero stories, which skew more towards Arrow with its tangled plots and tragic origins, the main connection between Felicity and Kara is to do good through a sense of compassion, a desire to be good. Between the heat vision and flight and bow and arrow, they focus on the people they care about above all else.

[Stream Arrow on Netflix or Hulu]
[Stream Supergirl on CBS All Access]