‘Arrow’: Katherine McNamara’s Role Revealed in “Unmasked”

Arrow‘s midseason finale answered quite a lot of fans’ questions — including who exactly one of the show’s newest cast members would be playing.

Spoilers for tonight’s episode of Arrow, “Unmasked”, below!

As was teased earlier this week, the episode featured the debut of Maya (Katherine McNamara), a street fighter whose role in the show has been a mystery essentially since she was cast. To the surprise of some, Maya actually made an appearance in the show’s flash-forward sequences, and may have proved to be a major player in the process.

William Clayton (Ben Lewis), Dinah Drake (Juliana Harkavy) and Zoe Ramirez (Andrea Sixtos) found their way to an underground fight club in search for Blackstar, the mysterious person who appeared to be the last person communicating with Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards) before her death. As they quickly learned, Maya was Blackstar, a broker who moonlit as a member of a fight club to relieve stress.

Maya vaguely hinted that she and Felicity had worked together on some sort of illegal work in the past, and she was surprised to learn that she’d died. She revealed that Felicity had contacted her to get tools to build a bomb, which lines up with her plans to potentially level Star City.

Some Arrow fans will probably be surprised by what Maya’s storyline is, as quite a few had assumed that she would factor into the show’s present day (or maybe even be the new Green Arrow). But thankfully, it sounds like fans won’t be seeing the last of Maya anytime soon, and she could play a surprising role in what’s to come.

“I do have a lot of secrets up my sleeve that have been so graciously shared with me by the showrunner [Beth Schwartz] and by everyone else on Team Arrow,” McNamara said in a previous interview. “The biggest thing I can say is there’s a lot to come from this character, and there’s so much as an actor for me to mine out of it. And just like everyone at Arrow‘s been so welcoming, and it really has been a situation where I feel like I’m part of the family.”

Arrow airs Mondays at 8/7c on The CW. After next week’s “Elseworlds” crossover, new episodes will return on Monday, January 21st.