Arrow: Why season 8 brought back the Dark Archer

No farewell is complete without a trip down memory lane. We examine the crucial, surprising role of Tommy Merlyn in this week’s Arrow premiere.

Arrow put its full arsenal on display to start its final season. Directed by James Bamford with the confidence of a man who knows the material like his own home, “Starling City” featured a near-seamless blend of emotion, humor, and action, distilling the essence of the show into an hour that zipped by as breezily as a comic. You could hardly have hoped for a more promising beginning to the end.

This was vintage Arrow in more ways than one. References to previous seasons riddle the episode, from the cold open that mirrors the opening sequence of the pilot to the ponytailed, pen-chewing Felicity lookalike that Oliver encounters in the IT department of Queen Consolidated. And, of course, there were the cameos: Susanna Thompson as Moira Queen, John Barrowman as Malcolm Merlyn, Josh Segarra as Adrian Chase, and Colin Donnell as Tommy Merlyn.

Usually, such blatant fan service would feel like cheating, but there’s more to the callbacks than an opportunity for nostalgia.

“Starling City” takes place on Earth-2, an alternate universe in which Oliver died in the Queen’s Gambit shipwreck along with his father. Impersonating himself in order to retrieve dwarf star particles for the Monitor, Oliver gets a chance to observe the long-term effects of his absence on his family and friends. His mother and Malcolm are now married. Thea, driven into addiction by grief, overdosed on Vertigo and died. Felicity is running her own company. Adrian is the Hood rather than Prometheus.

Trauma, it appears, doesn’t only rupture lives; it also reassembles them. This is illustrated most clearly by Tommy’s arc. Embittered by Thea’s death, Oliver’s former best friend has adopted the persona of the Dark Archer and plans to exact vengeance on the Glades by destroying them with a machine that creates earthquakes. He has been rendered almost unrecognizable — and not just because he has a beard now. The Tommy that Oliver knew, he insists, was “a different me.”

Except Oliver knows that what is happening isn’t new. Back in season 1, Malcolm, attempting to avenge his wife’s murder, concocted the exact same plan to destroy the Glades. Tommy, in other words, didn’t become a different person; he just became more like his father. As we saw when he asked Malcolm for a job, that potential was always there. (In “The Undertaking,” Laurel catches him in a meeting and remarks, “Wow, you really look like your father. I never thought so before, but just now, I saw him in you.”)

At its heart, Arrow is a family drama, concerned with the ways children are shaped by their parents. Should we be responsible for their legacy? Are we doomed to repeat their failures? Oliver originally embarked on his vigilante mission out of a sense of obligation to his father, seeking to atone for his misdeeds, only to commit misdeeds of his own and pass that sense of obligation onto his children. History, like violence, is a cycle, and every character is, on some level, trapped in it.

With Tommy’s arc, the show goes a step further, suggesting that actions can echo across not only generations but timelines. It’s unsettling, the idea that you could be following in the footsteps of someone you never even knew existed, that your choices might not be your own. A passage from A.S. Byatt’s Possession, a novel that otherwise has nothing in common with a superhero show on The CW, springs to mind:

"“There’s something unnaturally determined about it all. Daemonic. I feel they have taken me over.”“One always feels like that about ancestors. Even very humble ones, if one has the luck to know them.”"

But even if you can’t control whether the past influences you, you can control how it influences you. Maybe you have to see other choices to know that choices exist, but luckily Oliver has been able to do just that. So, like he did many times before for many other people, he tries to persuade Tommy to make a different choice.

It works; Tommy decides not to go through with his plan. He manages to break, if not free from history, then at least away from it. Time may be an arrow, but who said it had to shoot straight?

Arrow airs Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET on The CW.