Arrow: How Tommy Merlyn Returns in “Living Proof”

Arrow‘s penultimate Season 7 episode aired tonight, taking Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) and company’s journey into a pretty significant direction. And in the process, viewers of the show got reacquainted with a familiar face.

Spoilers for this week’s episode of Arrow, “Living Proof”, below! Only look if you want to know!

The episode began with Oliver being trapped under a crumbled building by Emiko Queen (Sea Shimooka), only to be visited by Tommy Merlyn (Colin Donnell). As Oliver quickly realized, he was seeing Tommy as a hallucination as the result of the concussion that he had sustained. With Tommy’s guidance, Oliver escaped from the rubble, but Tommy quickly pointed out that his bow had been broken in the process.

Tommy then talked Oliver through what he was going to do with Emiko, and tried to argue that he didn’t have to resort to killing her. As the episode went along, Tommy began to tell Oliver to try to break out of the cycle of abuse and pain that his father caused, but Oliver disagreed.

Oliver then reconnected with the team, and they were quickly in the crosshairs of Emiko once again. Oliver decided to kill Emiko — only to turn around and find the rest of the team dead by her arrows.

Oliver then realized that everything he’d gone through was a dream sequence, and that he was still standing in the building with Tommy. Tommy then argued that Oliver should use his kindness and his positive qualities to try to get through to Emiko, and then told him it was time to “wake up”. Oliver then woke up in the real world, as Team Arrow helped him get out of the rubble.

Of course, Tommy has been canonically dead on the show since dying in a similar building explosion in the Season 1 finale, so fans probably assumed that this episode’s version of Tommy would be some sort of hallucination or another alternate thing. This particular Inception-style instance of Tommy returning feels particularly special, as it highlights the way that Tommy always tried to see the best of Oliver, and how Oliver tried to become a better vigilante in his memory.

Since his death, Tommy has popped up on the show here and there, even playing the Earth-X version of Prometheus in the 2017 crossover and a (sort of) alternate version of the Green Arrow during Oliver’s Season 6 trial. And as it turns out, the show had been making a pretty active effort to have him return sooner.

“It really is about two things when we’re talking about bringing a character in,” consulting producer Marc Guggenheim explained at a convention appearance in 2017. “It’s we’ve got to have the right story and the actor has to be available. You know a lot of times like we wanted different characters on different shows to come in and just the actor’s not available because like, we wanted, I’ll give you an example – Colin Donnell who plays Tommy Merlyn you know, spoiler, he has a cameo in this year’s crossover. We really wanted him for last year’s crossover for the Arrow 100th episode. We really wanted, you know, Tommy to return, but he’s a series regular on Chicago Med so we couldn’t make the schedule work out.”

There also is an extra bittersweet notion to Donnell returning in this episode, seeing as the show is gearing up for its eighth and final season.

“Being a part of this series from the beginning & being brought back over the course of its run has been beyond.” Donnell tweeted when the series was revealed to be ending. “It a professional highlight it & brought me wonderful lifelong friends. Thank you to all the fans who’ve kept Tommy alive all & congrats to all those involved.”

Arrow airs Mondays at 9/8c on The CW.