David Ramsey Suggests His Stint as Green Arrow is Six Episodes

11/02/2017 09:29 pm EDT

During an interview with ComicBook.com, Arrow star David Ramsey repeatedly referenced "six episodes" as the duration of John Diggle's term as Green Arrow.

Diggle, whose first full episode in the uniform was last week, is Oliver's oldest ally and closest friend in his war on crime, which has become less and less of a one-man show and more of a team operation. Diggle had suffered nerve damage in his hand during the explosion on Lian Yu at the end of season 5, but did not reveal the injury to Oliver when he was offered the job as Green Arrow. Instead, he has been taking performance-enhancing drugs that look suspiciously like Mirakuru.

"[Executive producer Marc Guggenheim] didn't go into great detail, besides 'you're going to be Green Arrow for a bit, and it's gonna be great,'" Ramsey revealed. "He didn't quite go into the fact that they really committed themselves to this, not just in terms of the story but in terms of how they've approached the press about it and social media about it. They have invested in developing this crossbow, which gives this rendition of the Arrow a whole new look. They committed themselves for six episodes or so, which is a good chunk of time. This very well could have been a way of facilitating the A-story, which is the more mature, evolved Oliver Queen….That's really what I expected. But there's this whole storyline about this performance-enhancing drug that he's taking, how this compromises the team, where it's going to take John Diggle. There's a really interesting storyline here that I'm really pleased they committed themselves to."

Because of the off-handed way he said it, Ramsey could easily have been making an offhanded, ballpark remark -- but at the moment the series is filming its tenth episode of the season, while airing the fourth. That means "six episodes" of Diggle as the Green Arrow are already completed from a production standpoint.

He has also revealed that his secret drug habit will have ripple effects that will plague the team for some time to come.

Arrow airs on Thursday nights at 9 p.m. ET/PT, following new episodes of Supernatural on The CW.

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