Arrow season 6 premiere: Who died, who lived in explosion on Lian Yu?

All season premieres hand out answers to questions posed by the previous finale, but “Fallout” had some juicier ones than most for fans of Arrow.

Note: Perhaps obviously, this article contains heavy spoilers for “Fallout,” the Arrow season 6 premiere. Read on only if you want to know who lived and who died.

The don’t make cliffhangers more cliffhanger-y (a term we just made up) than the one posed in the season 5 finale of Arrow. In the final showdown with Prometheus, the only characters we knew were safe were Green Arrow himself. Oliver Queen, and his son, William.

That’s because they were on a boat when almost literally every other character on the show was back on the island that made Oliver who he is today, which the villain had rigged with explosives. That meant there was a good chance not everyone survived.

Seriously, though, spoilers follow …

Who lived

Since “Fallout” began with an action sequence set five months after the battle at Lian Yu, we saw quickly that most of Team Arrow was okay, including Felicity, Diggle, Wild Dog, Mister Terrific and Black Canary. Flashbacks (appropriate, since this is Arrow we’re talking about) showed that Slade/Deathstroke was also okay.

The most interesting story was that of Earth-2 Laurel, who everyone but Dinah Drake and Quentin Lance believed was dead from the explosion. Another flashback showed that was untrue: Quentin and Dinah ran into her while searching the island for survivors, and he was forced to shoot her faux daughter, thinking he killed her.

Later, both Lance and the viewers discover that’s not the case …

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Who died

That left the fates of evil Laurel Lance doppelganger Black Siren, Oliver’s sister Thea Queen, and William’s mom, Samantha, unknown. Slade led Oliver to Thea’s body, where they also stumbled into a barely alive Samantha, who passed away after hearing that her son was okay. In the present, William blames Oliver for her death.

And surprise: Thea is not dead, but is in a coma, which we don’t discover until almost the end of the episode.

So to sum up, while nearly every member of the Arrow cast was in mortal danger, only Samantha actually died, while Thea was left somewhat the worse for wear. That’s pretty fortunate for a situation in which almost everyone’s life was in jeopardy. There was, however, another big twist at the end of the season premiere, but that’s a story for another article …