Felicity Smoak: The New Fonzie

This week Arrow's breakout character Felicity Smoak finally got her time in the spotlight.  Emily Bett Rickards turned in another great performance as her character's backstory was expanded through flashbacks and her past comes back to haunt her.  For two seasons she has deftly transcended the role of exposition delivering tech expert and swiftly became the moral center of the show.  All despite being originally intended as a recurring character and one based on an obscure comic book figure at that.  And not the fun, cult classic, Guardians of the Galaxy kind of obscure either.  Just a straight up little known character that no one cared about.

Smoak's trajectory from recurring role to major player is a familiar one.  It's kind of the television equivalent of the rags to riches rock star or the mailroom to corner office bureaucrat.  The two most famous examples come from sitcoms about midwestern working class families, a world wildly different from the dark Starling City of Arrow.  In the 70's the dangerously cool biker Fonzie became the centerpiece of Happy Days, quickly overshadowing the wholesome Cunninghams.  In the 90's the Winslows took a backseat to the absurdly geeky Steve Urkel in Family Matters.

Had to get this in somewhere, might as well be now.

Although it's unlikely that Felicity Smoak will take Oliver Queen's spotlight permanently, there is no denying that she has struck a chord with fans.  Her awkward humor and fan-girlish crush on her billionaire hunk boss (a trait that has been phased out in favor of genuine romantic potential), make her feel very grounded and relatable, while her intelligence, courage, and unshakable moral compass make her likable, even inspiring.  In some ways she's more heroic than any of her masked combatant peers who rely on her computer expertise.

Felicity's place in the Fonzie/Urkel paradigm is representative of our culture at large.  You probably know that nerds are cool now unless you've been living under a rock, but even then it's unlikely since Chris Hardwick has spent the past three years overturning every rock on the planet to host panels on the topic with single celled organisms so even they are aware of how well he's doing.  Forty years ago Chris Hardwick would have peed his pants if someone like Fonzie looked at him with mild annoyance.  Fonzie was bold and effortlessly cool.  He was superior in every way to the straightlaced dorks like Richie Cunningham and they both knew it.  Less than twenty years later Steve Urkel was born as an exaggerated nerd stereotype, smart but socially inept.  He may have been the star of the show, but he was still the butt of everyone's jokes.

Felicity is nerdy in her brilliance and tendency to say the wrong thing, but she's also capable and known to say the right thing when it most needs to be said.  She's as much a person of her principles as the square Cunningham, but she's respected for it.  Her almost supernatural skills as a hacker and confidence in her own abilities put Felicity closer to Fonzie than Steve Urkel or Richie Cunningham.  Nevermind what Chris Hardwick says, Felicity's nerdiness doesn't make her better than her muscle bound companions, she is simply their equal regardless (not despite) of it.

This week Arrow showed the world the person Felicity Smoak used to be.  We saw her dark hair, questionable morals, and bad taste in men.  We saw her looking eerily like the embodiment of death and couldn't look away.

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More importantly, the week before this one The Flash gave us a glimpse of the person Felicity Smoak will be.  We see her meeting Harrison Wells, who apparently is from the future.  We see him beaming with excitement to meet her and reciting her resume like he's on an Aaron Sorkin show.  We see that even with all the great things Felicity has done, she is still destined for greatness.