Arrow: New "Living Proof" Photos Spoil a Surprising Character's Return

Arrow's penultimate season is getting ready to air its final two episodes, and a new series of photos add a pretty interesting wrinkle to things. The CW has released two new photos for next week's episode, "Living Proof", which showcase a surprising character coming to the aid of Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell).

The photos, which you can check out below, see Oliver being joined by Tommy Merlyn (Colin Donnell) while in some sort of building wreckage. Oliver appears to be in slightly better circumstances than when Emiko Queen (Sea Shimooka) trapped him under the rubble of a building last week, but he certainly looks a little frazzled by Tommy's arrival.

Of course, there's the added caveat of Tommy dying in a very similar sort of building collapse in the show's Season 1 finale, which could mean that he's appearing as some sort of hallucination or dream sequence for Oliver. 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."

You can check out the synopsis for "Living Proof" below!

OLIVER IS PUT TO THE TEST — Oliver (Stephen Amell) finds himself in a precarious position. SCPD shows up with a warrant for Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards). Gordon Verheul directed the episode written by Oscar Balderrama & Sarah Tarkoff.

Arrow airs Mondays at 9/8c on The CW. "Living Proof" will air on May 6th.