'Arrow' EP Describes How Villains Will Challenge Team Arrow In Season 6

As often as not, one of the biggest problems plaguing Oliver and company on Arrow is a strategic [...]

By Russ Burlingame

arrow emerson richard dragon anatoly

As often as not, one of the biggest problems plaguing Oliver and company on Arrow is a strategic miscalculation: Oliver tends to underestimate his villains, believing that each new big bad is just another villain of the week until it is too late.

That won't happen this year, according to showrunner Marc Guggenheim.

"I feel like Oliver underestimating his antagonists tends to be a bit of a theme in Arrow," Guggenheim told ComicBook.com. "We're trying to write Oliver from a more proficient place, which is not to say he's always going to make the right calls, and he's not going to make mistakes...but generally speaking we're trying to have Oliver raise his game from a tactical perspective. And you guys will tell us how successful we've been and how successful Oliver's been. For sure, we are keeping with the grounded, you know, there's no metahumans -- there's street-level crime. Sometimes it's street-level crime with a high-tech component, as we've occasionally done on the show, other times it's street crime, with a very low-tech component and we really sort of mix things up this year."

That said, each villain will have a role to play; rather than having one big bad and a series of one-off challenges that Team Arrow has to defeat, Guggenheim assured us that each of the villains this year will challenge Oliver and his team in a different way.

"There's a method to our madness in terms of all the various differing casting things we've announced," Guggenheim promised. "We've got David Nykl back as Anatoly; that's going to provide a specific kind of antagonism. I will say Kirk Acevedo as Ricardo Diaz is absolutely phenomenal. He is just such a terrific, terrific character and a terrific bad guy. With season six and the way we're handling the enemies of Team Arrow, we're playing a bit of a long game, we have sort of a long-term plan that hopefully we can execute. But we were definitely recognizing that, coming into season six, we can't do the tried-and-true, easily meet the big bad in the season premier or the mid season finale. We have to change up our normal paradigms and then you build up the big bad in the back half of the year."

Arrow airs at 9 p.m. on Wednesdays on The CW.

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