Why Arrow Made THAT CHARACTER Into Prometheus

03/01/2017 09:02 pm EST

MAJOR spoilers for tonight's episode of Arrow!

Tonight's episode of Arrow completely shook up what fans thought they knew about the season's most prominent villains. After fans were led to believe that Star City's District Attorney, Adrian Chase (Josh Segarra), was following his comic book origin by doubling as the villain Vigilante, a completely different situation occurred.

As it turns out, Chase isn't actually Vigilante - he's the season's masked big bad, Prometheus.

We spoke to one of Arrow's executive producers, Wendy Mericle, about the Prometheus reveal, and why exactly the show chose to take highly-anticipated reveal of their villain's identity in that direction. According to Mericle, that sort of misdirect was exactly their intention from the start.

"One of the reasons we did do it was because everybody would be thinking, 'Of course he's going to be Vigilante.' Of course Adrian Chase is Vigilante in the comic books. And we thought it would be a really fun twist to do what we've always done on the show, which is to take the comic book mythology and turn it on its head, and see what kind of story we can mine from a surprise like that. It was also something different for this season. We wanted to change up how we introduced the big bad and change up when we did it, how we did it, and hopefully we succeeded in that this year."

Fan theories about Prometheus' identity ranged wildly, from Quentin Lance to Oliver's future son to a resurrected Tommy Merlyn. While the writers attempted to plant seeds of suspicion across the show's earlier episodes, Mericle said that Segarra playing Prometheus was the goal from the very beginning of the season.

"We always knew that Adrian Chase - and Josh Segarra, who is playing him - was our Big Bad. We always knew from the beginning in our very first discussions, which were started about a year ago right now. We knew that's what we wanted him to be, that's how we wanted to build it."

As for why Prometheus' revealed happened in tonight's episode, much less in the middle of a fight scene, completely to the surprise of fans expecting a huge end-of-episode reveal, Mericle says that was mainly an experiment on the show's part.

"I think in the timing of this specific episode, we had to play around with that a little bit more. There are certain moments in the season where you obviously want to build to. We could have done it in 5x09, we could have done it even later in 5x18. But I think we try, as much as possible, we try to let the stories dictate when these big reveals happen. It just felt right here, and it just felt right also to do it in the middle of the episode, and that also, I think, played against expectations in a good way."

Now that fans are aware of Prometheus' identity, a big question remains - when will Team Arrow discover the truth? As the promo for the next episode of Arrow revealed, Talia al Ghul actually does the honors of revealing Chase's secret to Oliver. When Oliver realizes that Susan has become kidnapped by Prometheus, he sets out on a crusade to stop him, although its clear that their conflict will stretch far beyond into the rest of the season.

MORE ARROW: Producer Says True Four-Show Crossover Coming Next Season / Helix Makes Their Move In "Checkmate" Synopsis / David Cassidy Admits He Has No Contact With Arrow Star Daughter / Ranking The Black Canary Costumes

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