Arrow bringing back Tommy Merlyn, Adrian Chase for final season

The final season of Arrow might be shortened, but that doesn’t mean they’re not pulling out all the stops to say goodbye to Oliver Queen in style this fall.

Entertainment Weekly reports that former co-stars Colin Donnell and Josh Segarra will return as guest stars in the show’s eighth and final season. For those unfamiliar, Donnell played Oliver’s best friend Tommy Merlyn, and Segarra played the Season 5 villain Adrian Chase (aka Prometheus). The fact that both these characters are, well, dead kinda raises a few questions, of course.

With the multiverse-shattering Crisis on Infinite Earths event coming in the fall, it sounds like these miraculous returns will likely be connected. Showrunner Beth Schwartz clarified that Adrian Chase returns in a “different way that expected.” He’s previously shown up in Oliver’s mind as a hallucination, but it sounds like this is something else. As for Tommy, producer Marc Guggenheim said this won’t be the “Tommy we know,” so that likely rules out a flashback or resurrection. He has also returned in flashbacks and hallucinations since his character's death.

But, if these returns are different from what they’ve done before? Best guess is we’ll meet alternate versions of these characters from the multiverse.

Along with the surprise returns, the series is also promoting a recurring star to series regular for the final set of episodes. Katherine McNamara, who played the future version of Oliver and Felicity’s daughter Mia Smoak, will be a series regular. That likely means the future world we were introduced last year will be sticking around for the final run.

Arrow’s final season premieres Oct. 15 on The CW. The Crisis event will cross over every Arrowverse series this fall.

The CW

(Via Entertainment Weekly)