Arrow is finally set to come full circle in Season 5 as Oliver completes the journey set up for him all the way back in the pilot. He'll finish his flashback transformation from poorly-coiffed playboy into a weapon, and he'll finish his present development from weapon into hero. Unfortunately, Oliver will have a rough go during this journey thanks to his role in creating the show's latest supervillain. Arrow executive producer Marc Guggenheim had this to tease about Oliver's connection to the new big bad, who is known as Prometheus:
I can really only say that Oliver bears a measure of responsibility for the creation of Prometheus.
Season 5 won't be the first time that Oliver is at least somewhat responsible for the advent of a supervillain. Slade Wilson never would have targeted Starling City in Season 2 if not for his vendetta against Oliver, and civilians died in Season 3 when Oliver resisted giving in to Ra's al Ghul. Even Malcolm Merlyn in Season 1 and Damien Darhk in Season 4 only openly escalated their evildoing when Oliver entered the game. Oliver isn't to blame for some of the biggest and baddest bad guys making the choices to become villains, but their villainy is often tied to his actions. If Marc Guggenheim's hints are to be believed, Prometheus may be the most personal blast from Oliver's past since Slade.
Of course, Oliver has an awful lot of skeletons in his closet thanks to his five years of hell and his one year of killing in Starling City, so it's hard to guess which of his actions kicked Prometheus off into his quest for revenge. Considering some of the other hints that Marc Guggenheim has dropped, we can probably guess that Robert Queen's notebook/Oliver's Season 1 death list will make a comeback. Guggenheim went on in his chat with EW to share this about how Season 5 will connect to Season 1:
As the season progresses, you'll see that there are a lot of callbacks to season 1. What we're doing is we're dramatizing Oliver's desire to grow, move forward, and evolve, but this concept of legacy keeps threatening to pull him back to the early days.
If Prometheus does indeed to connect back to Oliver's days as a killer, we can bet that he'll have a very hard time with that desire to grow and move forward. Despite progress, Oliver often still defaults to a pretty dysfunctional emotional state under pressure, and he definitely doesn't always keep his cool if the people he loves are in danger. He's already broken his vow against killing a few times over the past couple of seasons; perhaps Season 5 will see him escalate his violence closer to how he fought in Season 1. We already know that the show is getting back to its basics and avoiding magic. What could be more basic than Oliver struggling with the legacy of his dark days as the Hood?
Check out the Season 5 premiere of Arrow on Wednesday, October 5 at 8 p.m. ET on The CW to see Prometheus' grand debut, and don't forget to take a look at our fall TV premiere schedule to see when your other favorite shows will return to the airwaves.
