Arrow Season 5: Diggle Will Have To Adjust To Oliver's New Friends

Team Arrow isn't the same without John Diggle, and while he won't be a part of the team from the outset of season 5, he will be joining back up at some point down the line.

Once he comes back, though, the team will look drastically different than when he left, with new additions like Wild Dog, Artemis, and an expanded role for Curtis, who might be debuting his Mr. Terrific guise later in the season. According to executive producer Wendy Mericle, it will take some adjustment from Diggle to fully get on board with his new teammates (via TV Line).

"He's stationed in Chechnya," executive producer Wendy Mericle reveals. "He's still in the military, and he's very much a man without a state. He's away from his family, and he's away from the team, so he's away from that family. He's trying to figure out how he can get that sense of himself back after killing his brother." Once Dig does come back to Star City, he won't be a fan of Oliver's ragtag new superfriends. "He's not going to love all these little upstarts, trying to take over his role," Mericle says. "But he'll adjust. He's going to find some common ground with Wild Dog, and that will help take the sting out of it."

In many ways, season 5 of Arrow will be a return to basics, including a stronger focus on Oliver himself and the myriad of ways his past and present actions have affected his teammates and the city as a whole.

"Essentially the theme that we're dealing with this year is legacy" says Mericle. "The idea [is] Oliver honoring Black Canary's [Katie Cassidy] legacy after Laurel's death last year. 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."

Arrow returns to The CW on October 5th.