Warning: spoilers for this week’s Arrow are ahead!
If you’ve been watching Arrow recently, you know that Thea Queen is finally suffering intense side effects from the Lazarus Pit after being fully healed in it last season. This week, however, showed what happens when you submerge a long-deceased person within. In this case, Sara Lance came back from the dead in “Restoration,” but instead of being her normal self, she was crazed and animalistic. And it turns out these two may not be the only current characters who were resurrected in the Lazarus Pit. Season 4’s main antagonist Damien Darhk may have also taken a long dip in it at some point.
John Barrowman, a.k.a. Malcolm Merlyn/the new Ra’s al Ghul, recently chatted with EW about Malcolm’s comment about how Sara will have to kill Thea, but play close attention to what he said about Damien near the end. According to Barrowman:
Scary, right? But, to be fair, Malcolm was the mastermind behind her death. He’s not afraid of her because, in his mind, he killed her once, he can kill her again. But he doesn’t know what she’s come out of the pit with. Everybody comes out of the pit different. People come out with a bit of every soul that has been put in the pit before. Some parts of those souls take over. Thea’s got a bloodlust. Damien Darhk’s got something else. What will Sara come out with?
Barrowman’s comment makes it sound like Damien is also one of the people that’s come out of the Pit before. The newest big bad has been described as being pure evil (and proven it a few times already), but what if he didn’t get there just on his charming personality? When the first Ra’s al Ghul (a.k.a. Matt Nable’s character) first mentioned Darhk’s existence to Oliver in Season 3’s “Al-Sa-him,” he said that after Darhk lost his bid to lead the League of Assassins, he escaped with his followers and some of the waters from the Lazarus Pit. This is the way he’s kept himself alive and physically rejuvenated after all these decades, but it might not be his only use of the waters. Perhaps at some point in his long life he was badly injured or died, and someone revived him in the Lazarus Pit, but instead of getting the bloodlust that Thea and Sara have, he was irreversibly corrupted. If that happened, does that mean we’ll see flashbacks of a nicer Damien?
On the off-chance that Damien doesn’t have any further connections to the Lazarus Pit, that doesn’t mean an outside force didn’t change him. I’m specifically talking about the magic he wields. He was seen performing a blood ritual at the end of the Season 4 premiere, and this magic has given him abilities like super strength, telekinesis and killing someone just by touching them. When you’re tampering with forces that dark, they’re bound to change you in a negative way.
You can watch Damien’s plot unfold on Arrow Wednesdays at 8 p.m. EST on The CW, though also keep an eye out for him on The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow this season.
