Arrow's Season 5 villain, Prometheus, is a resurrected Tommy Merlyn. After he died in the Season 1 finale, Talia al-Ghul stole his body and dipped him in a Lazarus Pit, with the intention of turning him into a weapon to use against his father, League of Assassins apostate Malcolm Merlyn. But Tommy didn't play entirely according to the script, and went off-mission to hunt down Oliver. (Church telling Prommy Oliver is the Green Arrow (Arrow 5.05) is a red herring; Prommy already knew.)
Also red herrings: Tommy's "enforced absence" from the 100th episode (Malcolm's line about Tommy being a doctor in Chicago is a reference to actor Colin Donnell's role on Chicago Med that allegedly prevented him from appearing in that episode), and everything pertaining to Justin Claybourne. Because, come on, without those two things, it's stonking obvious.
Prometheus considers Oliver a killer because of his actions as the Hood. So did Tommy. We know that Season 5 is really trying to tie back into Season 1 (cf. "nobody can no my secret" and everything leading up to it in both 1.01 and 5.01). It's obvious that Prommy is after Oliver for some reason, and the villains who have gone after Oliver (as opposed to Star(ling) City) have done so at specific times for specific reasons. Slade Wilson/Deathstroke didn't attack until Season 2 because he'd been trying to just let things go until the Mirakuru rage finally got the better of him. Ra's al-Ghul didn't attack until Season 3 because he had no reason to do so until Oliver started sheltering Sara's killer. For Prommy to wait nearly four years to go after Oliver because of something the Hood did to Justin Claybourne rings a bit hollow in comparison. But there is something that happened much more recently that would give Tommy cause to come after Oliver with a vengeance.
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| To be fair, the fact that Laurel takes a moment out of her death scene to ship Olicity makes me angry too. |
Consider: Tommy loves Laurel. Oliver steals Laurel. Tommy dies saving Laurel. Oliver eventually recruits Laurel into his team (not remotely what happened - Oliver was very reluctant to let Laurel suit up) and she eventually dies because of it.
See, as mind-numbingly stoopid as it was to kill off Laurel (at least, it's stupid once it turns out that the rumors about a Birds of Prey film were just rumors), at least both Arrow Season 5 and Legends Season 2 are getting serious character mileage out of it. Having a villain come after Oliver because he blames him - as Oliver does - for Laurel's death makes sense.
Oh, by the way, here's another reason Prometheus can't be Justin Claybourne's illegitimate son: Claybourne Junior would be after the Hood, not Green Arrow, and Arrow Season 5 has already gone out of its way to remind the audience that nobody outside of Team Arrow knows that the Hood and Green Arrow are the same person (Arrow 5.06). Church telling Prometheus that Oliver is Green Arrow wouldn't mean anything to Claybourne Junior - hell, Claybourne Junior's beef should be with the guy everybody thinks is a) Roy Harper (Arrow 3.18) and b) dead (Arrow 3.19)!
Finally, we already know that Talia al-Ghul is going to make an appearance later this season. And - oh my - she'll first be appearing in flashbacks in 5.11 (note that the clip in the link contains a pretty blatant spoiler for 5.10, which airs January 25). In 5.09, Oliver says that Prometheus used a move "a woman in Russia" taught him how to use. Gee, I wonder who that woman could be? And you know how sometimes Arrow forgets that it's not Batman With A Bow? (cf. all of Season 3 but most notably 3.21.) Well, in the comics, Talia plays a key role in bringing Batman's fallen comrade Jason Todd back as the villainous Winter Soldier Red Hood. And, oh yes, she used a Lazarus Pit to do so.
That just leaves one big problem, namely the fact that the Lazarus Pit was destroyed in 4.03. Well, first of all, I'm not convinced that's the only Pit. After all, Damien Darhk, who started out in the League, has been using something to stop ageing since at least the 1940s, long before he got his magic powers (Legends 2.01). We've also seen Talia once before, as a roughly eight-year-old child in Legends 1.09, set in 1960. But Talia's actress was born in 1973, making her twenty years younger than her character. So Possibility A is that there's more than one Lazarus Pit, as there are in the comics. (Of course, Nyssa and - presumably - Malcolm would both know this, and Nyssa would presumably have destroyed them all to prevent Malcolm from coming back.)
Possibility B, which I think is more likely (after all, if there's another Pit out there, it's going to make death very cheap going forward) is that Talia dunked Tommy before the events of Season 4.
We'll have to see how this plays out - it's possible that Talia has a grudge against Oliver because of something he did in the flashbacks, and is using Tommy to get to him... but that feels like a wholesale retread of a) Season 2 and b) The Dark Knight Rises.
I'm not sure what Talia's relationship to the League of Assassins is in the Arrowverse - I imagine she can't be too close to them given that a) Oliver doesn't seem to know a whole lot about them until Season 3, despite them showing up in Season 2, and b) her, you know, absence from the LoA-heavy Season 3. Here's a thought. The League was after Malcolm from the end of Season 1 until the end of Season 3, when he became its leader. It's possible that Talia, whatever her beef was with her father, didn't take too kindly to Malcolm leading the league and decided to resurrect his son to use him as a weapon against Malcolm. There's plenty of time for her to have done that; the show mostly takes place in real time, so Malcolm became the head of the League in the spring of 2015, but the Pit wasn't destroyed until that fall. But when Oliver defeated Malcolm and Nyssa disbanded the league (4.13), Talia's original plan fell apart. And then Laurel died roughly two months later (4.18), and Tommy went off the deep end and swore revenge on Oliver, using the skills Talia had taught him.
Admittedly it stretches in places, but that's my theory.
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