At this point, it’s very hard to imagine the Arrow landscape without John Diggle. Really, David Ramsey’s character has been there since the very beginning and has evolved from being Oliver Queen’s bodyguard to Spartan, a superhero in his own right who has been key in the crusade to save Star City for the past several years. Granted, Ollie and Dig had quite the spat near the end of season 3, but they’ve since patched things up.
If you’ve been keeping up with the series, then you’re well aware of how Oliver attempted to leave the vigilante lifestyle earlier this season, thus passing the mantle of Green Arrow on to Diggle. Of course, that lasted only for a few episodes, but we’ve since learned what the latter’s time under the hood meant to him.
In the time since Oliver has reemerged as the Emerald Archer, he’s told his best buddy that he intends on handing back the torch – or, in this case, the bow – before long. But, as we the viewers know, he’s admitted in private that it’s just not going to happen.
Now, the idea of the two coming to blows over who gets to wear the hood seems somewhat trivial, but when answering a question posed by Stephanie, a TV Line reader, who asked if they’ll “dive deeper into why Diggle wants to be the Green Arrow,” David Ramsey had this to offer:
“It’s much more complicated, clearly, than him wanting to be Green Arrow. What Stephanie has seen so far has just been me wanting the mantle, when in reality, it goes far deeper than that, and we’ll get into that. We explore specifically what the Green Arrow mantle means to Diggle.”
Furthermore, Ramsey says “this is a long time boiling up,” and that this “is no longer just Oliver’s crusade. It is also Felicity’s, it is also John Diggle’s, and it’s also the lives and the families of everyone else on the team, so Diggle is speaking not just for himself but for a lot of other people. [It’s] a well-constructed argument of ideologies, and it goes very deep, and it goes beyond words. It’s not just words.”
Thankfully, there’s not much longer to go before the poo hits the fan, as the next episode of Arrow, “Brothers in Arms,” airs tonight on The CW.
