Alex Kingston Joins Arrow, Could be the Original Black Canary?

Arrow isn’t a great show by any stretch of the imagination, but I respect it for what it’s trying to do and have some hopes that eventually it will succeed. And let’s be real: I also enjoy the near constant references to obscure facets of the DC universe and it’s liberal borrowing from the Batman canon for villains and supporting characters. It’s those bits that keep the nerd in me casually watching it in the background of my other activities.

With the addition of Alex Kingston to the cast, however, the show’s going to pique the interest of an entirely different fandom.

Alex Kingston, the actress who plays River Song when she’s in the Doctor Who universe, will join the cast as the second transplant from the BBC show. The first was John Barrowman, formerly Captain Jack Harkness, now in Arrow recurring villain Malcolm Merlyn. But comic fans should have just as much to get excited about as Whovians.

Kingston will be playing Dinah Lance, the mother of the show’s Dinah “Laurel” Lance, who became estranged from the family after her younger daughter died in the same boating “accident” that left Oliver Queen stranded on his formative island. That is, Kingston will be playing a character who greatly resembles the original Black Canary, mother of the currently more well known modern version of the character. (For some possibly more relevant thematic reference, Black Canary is one of the characters who Alan Moore‘s Silk Spectre was meant to imitate.) In comics, when Dinah Drake eventually settled down, it was to marry a detective whose surname was Lance, much like the show’s Quentin Lance, Laurel’s policeman father.

According to Entertainment Weekly, “later this season Dinah will return to Starling City to make amends with her family.” One can’t help but wonder what she’s been doing in those five years away, and whether it will have some effect on Laurel’s current status as, you know, not a buttkicking vigilante yet.

(via Entertainment Weekly.)