Who Will Be Arrow’s Season 6 Big Bad?

Last night, Arrow wrapped its fifth season, bringing some status-quo altering changes to the show’s format and offering up a potentially deadly cliffhanger for most of the supporting cast.

What it didn’t do — and what Arrow has rarely done in the past — is offer a glimpse at season 6.

That would have been nearly impossible to do, to be fair: while Lian Yu has traditionally played an important role in Arrow, it isn’t the show’s setting, and audiences didn’t see any of Star City in last night’s season 5 finale.

We know Oliver will be back there next season, juggling his mayoral responsibilities with his role as Green Arrow, but that’s about all we know for sure. Even recent announcements that Katie Cassidy (Laurel Lance/Black Siren), Rick Gonzalez (Rene Ramirez/Wild Dog), and Juliana Harkavy (Dinah Drake/Black Canary) have been upgraded to series regulars for season 6 doesn’t guarantee their survival; we saw how little Black Siren and Captain Cold (Wentworth Miller) were featured after being migrated to Berlanti-verse wide “regulars” at the end of last season.

In any event, here’s our quick-hit rundown of the likely candidates we think might make an appearance as the season 6 big bad. If we missed any obvious ones, tweet at us @comicbook and let us know!

JOSEPH WILSON

With ties to H.I.V.E. in the comics and a now-reformed father who long believed him dead, it’s difficult to imagine Joe Wilson won’t play a major role in the next season of Arrow.

Oliver Queen provided Slade “Deathstroke” Wilson with files in last night’s season finale that he described as everything he and Felicity had on Wilson’s son, Joe.

In the comics, Slade has two sons: Joe, and Grant. In previous seasons, Slade’s wife Adeline and son Joe have been referenced; they were both seemingly killed during a raid on Wilson’s home, something that seems to be less true than previously assumed.

No Arrow episodes had previously mentioned Grant, who first appeared in the comics in 1980’s New Teen Titans #1.

In the Arrowverse, Grant has only appeared in one previous episode — “Star City 2046,” a season 1 episode of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, in which he was the Deathstroke of the future, squaring off against Connor Hawke, Oliver’s successor as Green Arrow.

it isn’t yet clear whether Joe will follow his path from the comics, or be more reminiscent of Grant’s TV version, if he shows up next season.

When Joe, better known in the comics as Jericho, was a child, he was held hostage by The Jackal, a terrorist who was after his father. Deathstroke refused to give Jackal the information he wanted because it went against his professional code of ethics. Deathstroke managed to rescue his son, but not before one of Jackal’s men had started to cut his throat. As a result, he was rendered mute.

As a result of that incident, and the fact that Slade had lied to her, his mother divorced his father, and took her two sons (Joseph and his older brother Grant) with her.

His metahuman power, a result of the biological experimentation done on his father years before, appeared in his late teens, while trying to save his mother, Adeline, from an assassin. He had the power to take possession of any humanoid being he can make eye contact with. Once inside, Jericho takes possession of his target’s voluntary motor functions for his own use, attaining full physical control if the body is unconscious. In addition, if the host is unconscious while Jericho is in control, he can speak through the host’s body, but only with that person’s accent and vocabulary and easily control the body physically. Jericho’s body changes into an astral form seconds before possession.

Joseph Wilson first appeared in 1984’s Tales of the Teen Titans #42.

 

BLACK SIREN

With a new Black Canary on the team and Laurel Lance’s Earth-2 doppelganger playing a significant role in season 5 before being announced as a series regular for season 6, Black Siren seems like arguably the most obvious candidate to be the season’s big bad.

As someone who has been a series regular basically from the start, Katie Cassidy has done a lot of different things on the show, but never a villain until this year; starting out as a love interest with whom Stephen Amell struggled to find chemistry, she became a trusted friend and evolved into one of the most fully-fleshed-out characters on the series before making her final evolution into superhero mode.

From there, unfortunately, her journey ended when Black Canary was murdered by Damien Darhk during a prison riot that Team Arrow was working to quell. Her last request for Oliver was that he find someone to carry on her name and work — which he did in Dinah Drake, but the Earth-2 Laurel showed in the finale that she wasn’t totally on board with Laurel being a disposable part of the team.

For Black Siren to work her way up to Big Bad might be challenging; she’s already played her best cards by impersonating Laurel to destabilize Oliver and Quentin, and that ploy won’t work again. She’s powerful and cunning, but has shown little ability to think ahead…and as Prometheus showed this season, the best way to stay competitive with Team Arrow is to stay one step ahead of them the whole time.

 

HELIX

The hacker collective who learned all of Team Arrow’s secrets while seducing Felicity to the dark side is a pretty obvious guess, considering that they just kind of popped out of the series when things got too focused on Prometheus.

We don’t think they’ll attempt another run at Felicity; first of all, she more or less learned her lesson this season, and second, it looks like we’re on a bullet train back to Olicity-town, so the idea of her retuning to something that alienated her from Oliver would be a very strange creative decision for the writers.

That said, Helix has a lot of promise; Team Arrow and ARGUS were both pretty unhappy that Felicity helped them to free Cayden James, a dangerous hacker, and so don’t be surprised if trying to put that toothpaste back in the tube is part of a season 6 storyline.

Meanwhile, with Kojo Sledgehammer, they have kind of an anti-Felicity. If they were to hook up with, say, Talia and Black Siren they could have a kind of Evil Team Arrow vibe, and that could be a pretty cool concept for Oliver to grapple with. He’s had threats against his team, and he’s had evil doppelgangers of  himself in the form of Merlyn and others, but he hasn’t really had the Team Arrow version of the Legion of Doom, and Helix could be a shortcut to providing one.

 

RED STAR

While “you killed my father, now you must die” might feel kind of repetitive if they were to do it two seasons in a row, the fact that we have now firmly established that Oliver is responsible for the death of Konstantin Kovar on Lian Yu puts him at odds with Kovar’s son — if indeed that person has been born in the TV universe.

We also have the added wrinkle of Oliver having doublecrossed and embarrassed Anatoly Knyazev when he recruited the Bratva to help him take on Prometheus, but then reneged on the agreed-upon price of their help and tried to physical repel the Russians.

In the comics, Leonid Kovar’s father was an archaeologist, and when the two investigated a spaceship that had crashed into the Yenesi River, the ship exploded. It imbued Leonid with energy, and gave him powers of super strength, speed, flight, and pyrokinesis. Being a Russian patriot, he offered his services to his country and became the first official Russian superhero, taking the name Red Star.

(This used to happen a lot more back then; Animal Man’s origin is pretty similar, minus the father thing.)

Of course, in the comics, he’s a hero — so who knows? While it would have to be tempting to use Red Star given that they used Konstantin, there’s also the fact that it must have been tempting to use KGBeast once they introduced Anatoly, but so far, the writers have resisted that urge.

 

MORE ARROW

After a violent shipwreck, billionaire playboy Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) was missing and presumed dead for five years before being discovered alive on a remote island in the North China Sea. He returned home to Star City, bent on righting the wrongs done by his family and fighting injustice. As the Green Arrow, he protects his city with the help of former soldier John Diggle (David Ramsey), computer-science expert Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards), his vigilante-trained sister Thea Queen (Willa Holland), Deputy Mayor Quentin Lance (Paul Blackthorne), brilliant inventor Curtis Holt (Echo Kellum), and his new recruits, street-savvy Rene Ramirez (Rick Gonzalez) and meta-human Dinah Drake (Juliana Harkavy).

Oliver has finally solidified and strengthened his crime-fighting team only to have it threatened when unexpected enemies from his past return to Star City, forcing Oliver to rethink his relationship with each member of his “family”.

Based on the characters from DC, ARROW is from Bonanza Productions Inc. in association with Berlanti Productions and Warner Bros. Television, with executive producers Greg Berlanti (“The Flash,” “Supergirl”), Marc Guggenheim (“DC’s Legends of Tomorrow,” “Eli Stone”), Wendy Mericle (“Desperate Housewives,” “Eli Stone”), Andrew Kreisberg (“The Flash,” “Eli Stone,” “Warehouse 13”) and Sarah Schechter (“The Flash,” “DC’s Legends of Tomorrow”).

More Arrow news:

The Internet Reacts To Arrow’s Insane Season 5 Finale

Arrow: Did [SPOILER] Really Die?

The Arrow Easter Egg That Sealed One Character’s Fate

Arrow: Who Is Deathstroke’s [SPOILER]?