Arrow's David Ramsey Can't Wait For Spartan to Get Back Into the Field

02/08/2017 05:48 pm EST

Tonight on Arrow, Felicity and the rest of Team Arrow make their big play to get John Diggle out of military custody -- where he's been on and off throughout the season after being framed for crimes committed by a dirty general overseas.

And it's about time, says David Ramsey, who plays Diggle on the series. He's enjoyed having a little bit of a different palette to play with as Diggle, but he's eager to get back to Team Arrow business.

"It is a cool, different challenge," Ramsey told ComicBook.com. "But it is an action show, and I do yearn to be back there with the team. There were a few times that I was but then I got imprisoned again. I do yearn for it -- I can't hide that. I love Diggle, but I am in love with Spartan. I love getting out there and kind of mixing it up with the bad guys."

Of course, once he's back in the field, that doesn't mean he won't still be dealing with some of the same issues that have been lingering from last season, when Diggle was forced to kill his brother Andy. While Andy had been essentially asking for it, and died with threats against Diggle's wife and child on his tongue, John still blames himself, thinking that without an immediate gun-to-the-head style threat to life and limb, he killed his brother essentially in cold blood.

"He's still reeling from last year, and part of what's going on with him internally is still trying to cope with the choices that he's made," Ramsey said. And those kinds of choices are not going to be totally out of his purview, either, with Felicity potentially compromising herself to get him out of prison.

That's something that won't sit right with Diggle at all, Ramsey admitted.

"Diggle is probably the most principled of these characters, particularly on Team Arrow, right up there with Felicity," Ramsey said. "I think when he sees Felicity compromising her own morality, it's reminiscent of what he had to do last year, and of course he calls her on it....He sees himself as the protector of the team, and he wants to protect her from entering that dark side, which he has. Oliver lives there. And Felicity has always been the one that didn't have to go there; Oliver and Diggle kind of went there to get the edge, and Felicity didn't have to. At least that's what he felt."

On top of what she's already had to do, Felicity aligning herself with Helix is an obviously, predictably terrible idea, but one that Ramsey says other members of the team will see somewhat more clearly than Felicity, who demonstrated last week that she kind of misses being who she was before Team Arrow happened. Diggle, who has had recent experience with betrayal and conspiracy, smells something foul with the group right away.

"John has a leg up on that, in terms of being able to see," Ramsey said. "We're always playing with those themes on this show: when the characters really have a strong, emotional attachment to a choice, they can't see clearly the other side. So that's where the other team members come in and say, as Felicity said about Oliver last week, 'blinders.' And Felicity will have her own blinders that John will call her on....That's part of a running theme of this show, and that's part of why the team works so well is that certain members of the team can see the blind spots."

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Arrow airs Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW. A new episode, titled "Bratva," debuts tonight.

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