Oliver Queen might have spent the whole season breaking up with everyone close to him, only to realize this week that he is better with a team around him — but that doesn’t mean it will be easy to go back.
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The breakup — and the issues surrounding it, including Diggle turning his back on vigilantism and going to work for ARGUS — have been in the works since the season peremiere, according to David Ramsey, who plays Diggle in the series.
Furthermore, he thinks that the Diggle/Oliver breakup is one where fans should be able to see both sides of the argument and understand that neither man is entirely wrong, it’s just a matter of perspective and priorities.
“We talked about this at the beginning of the season — Marc [Guggenheim], myself, and Wendy [Mericle],” Ramsey told ComicBook.com. “About the breakup between Oliver and Diggle. This was planned from the very beginning of the season. ‘How is it done? How do we make it smart?’ How do we make it as smart an argument as the Iron Man/Captain America argument, right? Both these guys are right, both these guys are wrong. They both have excellent points. How do we do that? And ARGUS was always a piece of that that was planned to come up later on in the season.”
In the same interview, Ramsey described ARGUS as analogous to Marvel’s SHIELD: even if it doesn’t appear to be there, you know that secretly there is always a part of the organization in the background of the DC Universe, pulling strings.
ARGUS, of course, will be playing a much larger role in Arrow over the next few episodes and apparently into next season. With city government and local law enforcement compromised, an unaccountable federal agency that may or may not technically exist is a valuable ally to have.
Of course, if Oliver does in fact go to jail at the end of the season, as many fans are assuming he will, ARGUS has a certain Task Force that he could presumably join up with to make himself useful saving the city in a whole new context.
Arrow airs on Thursday nights at 9 p.m. ET/PT following Supernatural.
