Arrow: 10 Things to Know About What's to Come in the Rest of Season 5

Executive producer Wendy Mericle spills on Oliver's mental state & the future of the team

By Lauren Piester Apr 26, 2017 3:00 PMTags
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Arrow finally returns tonight after being off the air for almost a month, and if you think Prometheus is laying low in any way, you might want to think again. 

District Attorney Adrian Chase (Josh Segarra), also known as the villain Prometheus, was finally on his way to being served some justice at the end of the last episode when he killed his guards and split, driving away with a bloody face and a smile, whistling to the tune of "It's a Beautiful Morning." It's a pretty haunting image to have been left with for the past few weeks, and it makes it only clearer that he's really only just getting started. 

We hopped on the phone with executive producer Wendy Mericle to find out just what we can expect from this bad guy of all bad guys, and what kind of toll he's going to take on some of the members of Team Arrow, and we learned a few important facts about the remainder of the season. 

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1. Chase will not be thrown by the fact that there's now firm evidence against him. 

"I think he has every contingency planned out," Mericle says, describing Chase as a "ten-steps-ahead sort of guy." "It's not that he didn't anticipate it, but he can't hide in plain sight anymore, so he's going to up his game. And likewise, Oliver [Stephen Amell] is on the attack. These are two formidable people who are equally determined to get the other, so it's promising a pretty big blow out at the end." 

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2. Tonight's episode features a big move that may make compromise that evidence. 

"[Chase is] gonna pull some stuff at the end of 19 that will definitely keep the team on its toes, and in some ways prevent them from capitalizing on their victory in the previous episode," Mericle tells us. 

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3. The eventual showdown between Oliver and Chase will be major. 

"Chase understands the way Oliver thinks. He knows all of his weak spots. He knows how to manipulate him psychologically and emotionally, and he's going to pull out all the stops to do exactly that in the finale," she says. "I don't think we've ever seen Oliver go through something like this before." 

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4. Oliver's admission that he liked killing is going to continue to haunt him. 

"The truth is something like that that's so profound," Mericle says. "I mean that's a truth that I think we never really expected from Oliver. It's been under the surface in some ways, but for him to say something like that and to face that side of himself, that is not an easy thing to come back from and I think he's going to be processing it through the end of the season. By the end I think he'll have found a way to sort of put everything in the past five years to rest, but it's not going to be without a lot of heartbreak and a lot of one step forward, two steps back along the way." 

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5. And the rest of the team will rally around Oliver and "absolutely" continue to worry about his soul and psychological state. 

"He's going through something profound and Chase has pushed him to the brink. They know he's physically capable. There are very few people the Green Arrow can't take on and win against hand to hand, but this idea of breaking someone down psychologically and getting them to admit things about themselves that they've never had to admit before, it's that kind of psychological torture that the team is very worried about, and rightfully so," Mericle says. "I think in many ways this is the most formidable person Oliver's gone up against in the five years of the show, and he's doing it in ways that are forcing Oliver to look at his past and assess himself, and see his own mistakes and see the bad things he's committed over the past five years. He's done a lot of good, but there's also been a lot of bad." 

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6. Felicity's (Emily Bett Rickards) actions with Helix will have a huge affect on her friendship with Oliver.

"This was her season to go down the dark rabbit hole and figure out for herself who she wanted to be on this team and how she wanted to do things," Mericle tells us. "And as we know, since the death of Malone, she's really doubled down on this very Oliver season one idea of, you know, you gotta get the bad guys at all costs. There's no way she can get through that without some consequences, and Oliver is really having to stand by and witness it is and is really powerless to keep her from going deeper into Helix. It's going to change their relationship. It's really going to change the way he views her and the way she views him." 

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7. And she will definitely face consequences for her actions, "especially emotionally." 

"She's in bed with some pretty bad people," Mericle reminds us. "She doesn't necessarily know that now, but we've hinted at it a bit—the amount of information they have on people, what they do with it. They are, in many ways, like Oliver was in season one. They see themselves as judge, jury, and executioner and people taking personal information and using for the larger good, and whatever the larger good is defined by them. And Felicity having gone through that, come out the other side of it, and really starting to break down what she did and what she went through, it's absolutely going to have ramifications for her going forward, emotionally if nothing else." 

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8. Felicity may seek a future away from Team Arrow. 

"We hinted at it last year, which is when she had quit the team and she was like, I'd really like to do something. There are other ways to do good in the world and to fulfill her own personal mission, and going forward, especially in coming seasons, that is something she very much wants to do, and we really want to explore for her," Mericle says. "We talk in the writers room a lot about giving Felicity something that is not on the team and has nothing to do with Oliver and is very much her own thing, and that's something I think we really look forward to in season six." 

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9. Oliver's crumbling friendship with Anatoli (David Nykl) will be dealt with in the future, but not this season. 

"We'll definitely see the fallout of that at some point," Mericle says. "That's a thread we're sort of leaving dangling for a moment, but the idea that Oliver has an enemy out there and an enemy with a presence in Star City, there's no way we can't pick that up at some point, and we also want to. Anatoli's someone who's been close to Oliver for years, we love the actor, and it's got the potential for some really great stories." 

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10. The season five finale will be huge, but a little unexpected. 

"There are some quieter moments," Mericle says of the episode, which is called "Lian Yu" (we're going back to the island, y'all!). "They're not gonna come where people might think they're going to happen, and there's definitely going to be a lot of fireworks in the finale, but at the same time, the stakes are going to be much more emotional than they have been in the past. Chase has been someone who has again, really burrowed into Oliver's psyche and he's going to hit him where it hurts the most, and we're going to see that come to a head in the finale." 

Arrow airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on the CW.