ARROW: Marc Guggenheim and David Ramsey Preview ‘Suicide Squad’

ARROW is bringing viewers a bit of a different episode with tonight’s (awesome) new hour: Diggle takes center stage as he has to team up with the Suicide Squad.

“You know, it’s funny, we get asked the question a lot: how long have we known we were going to do the Suicide Squad?” ARROW executive producer Marc Guggenheim explained to reporters earlier this week. “And the truth is, it happened so organically, that I don’t have a memory [of the specifics]. For us, what happened was the year started — as year one did — with DC providing us with a list of characters who were available, and who they would like to see on the show. We went through it, and one of the characters was Bronze Tiger. We thought that was a character we could very organically ARROW-fy. And it seemed to make sense to us. But we had to wait for the right time…we find the right story to fit the character. And as it happened, we ended up doing it sooner than we expected, which was the second episode of season 2. And then we started to talk, well, we have Amanda Waller happening in episode 6, and we had A.R.G.U.S. last year, and we had Deadshot last year, so that gives us two members of the Suicide Squad — three, if you count Amanda — and we started whispering the words to each other: ‘Suicide Squad. Wouldn’t that be fun to get to?’ And then it just sort of happened very organically.”

And once they had the pieces in place, it still ended up being a character-driven reason that caused them to pull the trigger to go ahead with the storytelling.

“We really started out, quite frankly, because we wanted to do a Lyla/Diggle story,” Guggenheim said. “We had established this relationship at the end of last year and had evolved it a little further by getting them back together in episode 6 of this year. And it started off with, ‘What would be something good to have them fight about?’ And someone pitched in the writers’ room, if Lyla was involved with the Suicide Squad, and Diggle was not approving of it, that would be a nice source of conflict for the two of them. So it really started from a character perspective and us realizing we had a lot of pieces in play…It all came together very organically.”

And yes, Diggle will have his issues working with the Suicide Squad.

“Incredibly [hard for him],” David Ramsey (Diggle) teased. “[One of the guys] is the guy that killed his brother. There’s a very interesting dynamic that comes out of this episode between Floyd Lawton and John Diggle. A lot of ghosts between them. But at the end of the day, Floyd Lawton is a hired gun. There’s bigger cogs in the wheels, there’s bigger puppeteers behind him pulling the strings. And I think John Diggle kind of comes to a bit of closure after this episode.”

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ARROW airs Wednesdays at 8 PM on The CW.

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