Arrow: Andrew Kreisberg Talks Merlyn's Return and What It Means for the Future of the Queen Family

With Season One big bad Malcolm Merlyn set to return on Wednesday's episode of Arrow, Executive Producer Andrew Kreisberg told reporters at a recent screening that his motives will be...perhaps less ominous than some might think. As Deathstroke and his Mirakuru army attack Starling, Moira Queen is dead and her family left more or less penniless (apparently in the world of Arrow, the rich do go broke like the rest of us), Thea showed last week that she's ready to pack it up and leave town for parts unknown. On her way out, though, the war for the city kicked off and she's now found herself in a train station, surrounded by chaos and with no easy way out. Enter her biological father, Malcolm Merlyn.

"All hell is going to break loose in the city and Thea will find herself in a precarious predicament, and she will be saved by her father," Kreisberg said. "And Malcolm is going to offer her what she doesn't have anymore." It's a direction that the writers have apparently wanted to take with the character for a while, and they've been building toward it since the revelation that Thea is not the daughter of Robert Queen, but of Merlyn. The loss of Roy, of her Queen family ties, her money and finally of Verdant in "City of Blood" all just made it that much easier a logical leap for her to make. "That was part of our math with killing Moira -- that if we were going to send Thea in that direction, she needed to have nothing pulling her back here," Kreisberg said. "And now she has a brother who lied to her and has done something unforgivable, and no mother. And on the flip side she has Malcolm Merlyn saying, 'I will never lie to you, Thea.'" That's been Thea's big thing all season long, of course; last year, her mother lied about the Undertaking, and this year, it was the Malcolm revelation, alogn with a number of smaller things, that alienated her from Moira and Oliver. Add to that the idea that Oliver somehow had a secret relationship with Slade before the first time he walked into their house, and it's not unreasonable that Thea would have some familial trust issues. And then, of course, there's the fact that she's likely to find out in the next couple of episodes that her brother is the Arrow. It's hard to picture her pursuing a relationship with Merlyn and that not coming up. "Secrets are a tough thing, and one of the most interesting thing about writing this show is when are secrets good and when are secrets bad?" Kreisberg said. "Even for Oliver, he [hadn't] told Laurel [that he is the Arrow] -- and it's because he had an idea in his head that she shouldn't know. And I think you guys will all see he was wrong and he's going to find out that he was wrong not to tell her because she could handle it -- but yet, there was no reason for Thea to ever know that Malcolm was her dad. It's a complicated thing and we love that we have a superhero show where the heroes are doing the wrong thing a lot of the time and making bad decisions, even with the best of intentions." Arrow airs Wednesday night at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.