If there is one person — besides maybe Malcolm Merlyn — that Arrow fans have long seen as irredeemable, it’s probably Adrian Chase. The former district attorney, who became the costumed villain Prometheus, dedicated his life to destroying Oliver Queen and his friends — and he almost succeeded. Ultimately, Chase was responsible for the death of at least two and possibly several more people on Lian Yu, when he loaded the island with explosives and detonated it by killing himself at the end of Arrow‘s fifth season. So — why would it be good news to hear that Chase might be alive again following the changes to the timeline in “Crisis on Infinite Earths?”
Well, fans have seen that in different realities, Chase was not always a villain. On Earth-X, we don’t know what his role was, but we do know that Tommy Merlyn was Prometheus, so Chase wasn’t that. And on Earth-2, he eventually became the Green Arrow himself, working alongside a reformed Black Siren until their world was destroyed. So earlier this season, we asked series star Stephen Amell whether he thought the main Chase could have been saved.
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“Chase, he broke bad, but I feel like if Oliver ever had the chance — if Oliver turned…like, magic, and got a chance to bring people back, I feel like he’d bring Adrian back and be like, ‘man, do it right this time,’” Amell told ComicBook.com at the time. “Because you can see on Earth-2, the writers show you brilliantly that a couple of different things break a few different ways and who does Adrian Chase become? He becomes the Green Arrow and he becomes really good at it. So, yeah. Earth-1 is the worst possible scenario for him.”
Of course — that is exactly what happened to Oliver. Following the events of “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” Oliver Queen took on the power of The Spectre and, as we see in tonight’s finale, he did “turn magic and got a chance to bring people back.” So — is it possible that a reformed Adrian Chase exists out there somewhere in the Arrowverse?
“We talked about bringing Adrian back. I will say if we brought Adrian back, it would have opened up a can of worms in terms of, were other villains brought back?” series co-creator Marc Guggenheim told ComicBook.com yesterday. “And that was a Pandora’s box that Beth and I didn’t want to open. As much as we love working with Josh and really loved that character and everything, we were, so I’m not saying he’s not out there, I’m just saying we chose not to reveal one way or the other.”
Arrow airs its series finale tonight at 9 p.m. ET/PT on The CW, following a one-hour retrospective series titled Hitting the Bullseye, which will feature interviews that reflect on the series’ history and legacy.
