Posted in: DC Universe, TV | Tagged: arrow, cw, entertainment, HRL, John Diggle, marc guggenheim, oliver queen, television

Arrow Season 6: The Worse Oliver Has it, the More Heroic He Has to Be

We saw yesterday in a clip posted on Twitter that Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) and John Diggle (David Ramsey) are going to come to blows over who gets to be Green Arrow. This is something that has been hanging out there since early on in Arrow season 6 when Oliver asked Diggle to take the hood so he could focus on raising William. But when Diggle got hurt, Oliver suited up again and hasn't given it back.

The question becomes: how long will this be a problem? The answer is, well, a while. The trend of this season has been about Oliver losing everyone near to him, and that doesn't appear to be changing before the finale. Executive producer Marc Guggenheim talked to TVLine about the growing feud:

This season has been very much about removing all of the support structures from Oliver. One of the challenges we placed for ourselves in season 6 was we got Oliver to the end of his emotional journey in season 5. He finally moved on from the past, he was a much more emotionally complete human being. So the challenge for season 6 was: How — in a show that really, for the first five years, gained a lot of its story from the bad choices Oliver made — do we continue to make Oliver's life difficult, but have it come from something that he's enduring rather than the dark machinations of the soul?

One of the things we hit upon is the idea of we spent basically season 5 building up this team and this whole support structure bringing him closer to Felicity again, bringing his son into his life, and in season 6 what you've basically seen, and will continue to see, is the slow degradation of all those structures. Because it's all in service of what is probably one of the driving philosophies of this show, which is that the worse Oliver has it, the more heroic he has to be in order to overcome all of the crap that we throw at him. So that's kind of where season 6 is headed.

In other words, the worse Oliver's life is, the better the show is. That kind of sucks for Oliver.

Arrow returns tonight at 9 p.m. ET on the CW.

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