Given that there's a specific story reason for her to show up on Vixen that was introduced in Arrow 4x16, I doubt that's the case.
I don't buy that they hadn't made the decision about who was going to die before they started working on the season.
It runs entirely counter to everything that I understand about how television writing works.
Therefore, I don't buy the idea that Katie's future appearances on The Flash and Vixen are contractually motivated because they suddenly decided that Laurel was going to be the character they killed off and therefore they needed to honor existing contractual obligations with Katie in some fashion.
Just because they haven't started writing writing season 5 yet, that doesn't mean they don't have plans for it. They already set up how he ends up going to Russia next season in the flashback.
So it it highly plausible that they had an inkling that Laurel would be the one to die. They've foreshadowed something happening to the Lances, and honestly, had the photos not been leaked ahead of time, it would have been shocking since most people expected Quentin to be the one to die.
And again, this happens all the time. Roy was "killed" last season around the same time, and still appeared. Lana was written into a coma to cover the fact that she wasn't returning after the Writer's strike in 2007, since she had signed on to do a film instead, despite having her contract having her appear in every episode, so she owed them those episodes, unlike LEx who fulfilled his end of the bargain.
I feel like a lot of my fellow Laurel fans could stand to take the following quote to heart:
Even if you're upset by the decision to kill her off, I don't see how said decision invalidates the character journey she went on.
They did what they said they were going to do, even if there was a bump or two along the way (Marc Guggenheim giving the anti-Laurel crowd fuel for their opinions), and gave the character a journey that paralleled Oliver's far more than any other character on the show (including Sara).
The problem is we waited three seasons to finally see the real Black Canary, and while they gave us the arc and costume, they didn't really do much else to help the character. Season 3 started with Laurel talking about how she and Oliver make a good team, since he catches bad guys and she puts them away for good in jail. But aside from Dhark, they never explored that aspect of her character for over a year, and they don't do that for any of the other characters either.
There were so many interesting areas to explore with the character, and the fact that she had reduced screen time, and had most of her scenes end up as deleted on a DVD, it shows a great amount of disservice to a character and actor that initially signed on to the second lead. But instead, they turned her into just another background character.
I hate how they made laurel's last scene about Olicity........
Should be expected though.... The writers are so damn obsessed with that ship.
It's like "Hey, we got some good news and some bad. The bad is Laurel's dead, but the good .... she totally supports Olicity! So this is what she would want."
Just woke up and was thinking how lame it was that of course Oliver can survive a much more brutal stabbing from Ra's on top of a mountain and fall off, then be healed by some basic herbs but god forbid Laurel get actual medical help and she can't even survive that.
I gotta say, I'm totally not handling this death well. Like I've never been this emotionally invested in a character's death before. Like it sucked when Roy left, but at least he was still alive. Moira and Shado's deaths were shocking, but they worked for the story. But this ... this just has horse**** written all over it.
As much as I love giving a big **** YOU! to to the idea of "Destiny," DCTV really has no respect for the GA/BC relationship. The only time it was even close to well done was in JLU... then Smallville and now this God where's the justice?
We're 0-2 so far.
