Once upon a DC comic, there was a costumed fighter-slash-vigilante named Green Arrow. Fast forward to 2012 and CW’s picked up a new show called Arrow… based on the DC comic. Now, I never read the comics so I don’t know who all the characters are. Having said that, there are no spoilers here… and I can’t speak to how authentic the story is on the show, compared to the comics.

Arrow is supposedly based on Green Arrow, so there’s room for creative license here. The series follows billionaire playboy Oliver Queen (played by Stephen Amell) who, after five years of being stranded on an uncharted island, returns home to fight crime and corruption as a secret vigilante whose choice of weapon is a bow and arrow.  In the show, Vancouver is renamed to Starling City.

I recognized this location right away – probably because I’ve seen it so many times. The Fairmont Pacific Rim plays host to Oliver Queen’s homecoming party in the first episode. They even do an overhead shot of his party from a neighbouring building (unsure which building it was, though). See below.

One thing they did right, though, was to cut in the rotating globe from the Vancouver Convention Centre into the scene, so that the Fairmont Pacific Rim seemed to be bigger than it was. But we know better.

And finally, one more screenshot:

Interestingly enough, this particular building was also used in one of the episodes of The Killing – but not the exterior shots. In The Killing, they focused on the interior, where you can see the pool with the see-through bottom. Kind of neat! But it’s nice to see that BC Place was pretty prominent in the background!

You can catch Arrow on CW on Wednesdays at 8pm.