WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for the Season 7 premiere of Arrow, “Inmate 4587,” which aired Monday October 15 on The CW.
Not long after Season 6 of Arrow concluded, it was announced that Colton Haynes was returning to the series as a regular member of the cast for Season 7. Haynes had departed the CW series midway through its third season, and had made sporadic guest appearances throughout subsequent seasons. However, this marked the first time in four years that the actor was now back to series regular status — something that obviously had a lot of fans excited for his return.
What was even more intriguing was the fact that no one in the Arrow production team would tell us what Roy’s role in Season 7 would be. Even more mysterious, the character was nowhere to be seen in the trailers, promos and posters hyping the premiere of the season.
Finally, the mystery was put to bed last Monday when the new season of Arrow premiered. At the close of the episode, we discovered that part of the story was now being told in flash-foward form — Oliver Queen’s son William is now all grown up, and he has traveled to the island of Lian Yu where he meets a much older Roy Harper.
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In the episode itself, we only caught a brief glimpse of Arsenal in the dark, but what little we saw confirmed that he was still skilled in archery and wearing a superhero costume. Well now, thanks to a new picture from the set of Arrow, we have a clear look at future Roy’s costume.
#Arrow just cast Older William as a series Regular this year. And the showrunner said the new “Flash Forwards” will be a thing in every future season of the show until it goes off the air pic.twitter.com/n6hVtkkviS
— Charlie Schneider (@AwesomEmergency) October 17, 2018
As we can see, Arsenal’s costume still looks like the old one he used to wear back when he was the Arrow’s partner fighting crime in Star City. However, it looks considerably worn and torn, and the added presence of a black combat vest makes us wonder how long Roy has been sequestered on the island.
When Roy left town in Season 3, he bequeathed his uniform to Thea Queen, who has since left the series. This means that, somehow, in the future, Roy gets his old costume back, and finds himself on Lian Yu. But why? We’ll just have to keep watching to find out.
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Airing Mondays at 8 pm ET/PT on The CW, Arrow stars Stephen Amell as Oliver Queen, David Ramsey as John Diggle, Emily Bett Rickards as Felicity Smoak, Rick Gonzalez as Wild Dog, Echo Kellum as Mr. Terrific, Juliana Harkavy as Black Canary and Katie Cassidy as Black Siren.