Arrowverse: 15 best Arrow moments of all-time

7. Oliver Calls Moira From The Fishing Boat

Episode: “Lian Yu” (Season 5, Episode 23)

It’s hard to refer to this moment as a Season 5 event when we all know that it really took place a long time before that. In fact, it took place right before the events of the pilot episode.

Nonetheless, it was perhaps the most fulfilling moment of the fifth season because, after all this time, it finally showed us how the story ended.

The flashback narrative had one purpose as it played out over the course of Arrow‘s first five seasons, and that was to show us the hell that Oliver experienced on Lian Yu from start to finish.

It had a starting point (the sinking of the Queen’s Gambit) and an ending point (Oliver returning home), but it was up to the flashbacks to fill in the blanks in the middle. While that didn’t stop it from venturing too far off-course on multiple occasions, it did manage to rein it back in, as Oliver’s time on the island drew to a close in the Season 5 finale.

After he defeated Konstantin Kovar, the show began recycling some of the footage we saw in the Pilot, as Oliver signaled a fisherman’s boat for help. With the return of this Season 1 footage, we thought that the narrative had officially come to an end and that this was simply taking us back to the beginning of the show to wrap it all up.

What we didn’t expect was a newly filmed, never-before-mentioned scene where the rescued Oliver called his mother from the boat.

What was even better was that Susanna Thompson returned in an unannounced appearance as Moira became emotional upon hearing her son’s fragile voice over the phone.

As she burst into tears of joy, proclaiming her love for him, it warmed our hearts because this right here, this was the moment we always wanted Oliver and Moira to share. It was so unexpected that left us all emotional wrecks… and that was just before the episode’s jaw-dropping conclusion.