Arrow: More Details on the Birth of Suicide Squad

Yesterday at a Q&A with journalists, Arrow executive producers Marc Guggenheim and Andrew Kreisberg announced that the upcoming sixteenth episode of the show's second season will be titled "Suicide Squad." Part of a five-episode stretch that producers jokingly referred to as "villains a-go-go," "Suicide Squad" will blend new and old faces as part of Amanda Waller's notorious Task Force X from the DC Comics source material. So, who's going to be on the team? Waller will swing into town with demands for Diggle yet again, just as she did earlier in the season. This time, he and Lyla Michaels--the A.R.G.U.S. Agent he and Oliver rescued from a brutal Russian prison last time out--will be forced to lead a crew of misfits on a secret mission for Waller--including Floyd "Deadshot" Lawton, among others. "Dig was our way in to Amanda Waller," Kreisberg explained. "In this episode, Amanda comes to Dig and Lyla and she basically recruits Dig for a mission and tells him he's going to need a team--and she saddles him with the Suicide Squad, including Floyd Lawton." Ben Browder will return to reprise his role as Ted Gaynor, Diggle's former Blackhawk Squadron commanding officer--but as expected, it will be in flashback. The episode will not flash back to the island, and instead will be told entirely from Diggle's perspective, and tell the story of a mission in Afghanistan to which Diggle alluded during the show's first season." "In episode fourteen of last year, Diggle told Felicity this story about, he saved the life of this warlord--a guy named Golam Kadir," Guggenheim added. "Well, in episode sixteen the flashbacks will be told from Diggle's perspective, in Afghanistan, saving the life of Golam Kadir." It's probably safe to assume that Michael Jai White will return to reprise his role as Bronze Tiger once again, since he was recently recruited for the Suicide Squad (at the end of last week's episode)--but that's not a guarantee since the producers didn't mention him by name, and they did say that Browder came in and worked for a fraction of his rate in order to help them out, since the episode was running over budget. "The coolest part is we actually have Ben Browder back who played Dig's former commanding officer who was a villain in the present day but in the old days, he was just Dig's commanding officer," said Kreisberg. "And a special shout-out to Ben Browder, becuase he actually took a significant pay cut to do this because this episode was getting out of hand financially. He just said, 'You guys were cool guys and I had fun,' so he's a great guy."