Arrow Season 8: 10 characters who need to return for Arrow’s final season

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7. Tommy Merlyn

If Arrow‘s final season is all about honoring its past (as it should be), then you won’t find a more suitable candidate to feature than Tommy Merlyn. Oliver Queen’s lifelong best friend, Tommy was a major factor in the show’s first season as the former returned from Lian Yu a changed man.

From there, Oliver’s character growth would in turn influence Tommy, who also kicked the playboy life to the curb and attempted to earn the trust and affection of long-time on-again/off-again flame, Laurel Lance – proving that there was more to him than his rich-kid reputation gave him credit for. And this was something that he cemented when he rescued her from the collapsing CNRI, sacrificing his own life in the process.

Though he hasn’t been a regular part of the show since Season 1, Colin Donnell has made sporadic returns to the show in Seasons 2, 3, 6 and 7 through flashbacks, hallucinations and impersonations. Those, however, were never enough to fill the hole that his absence left in all of our hearts.

Tommy’s rapport with Oliver was one of first season’s most important narratives, as they both learned to make each other better men and, as a result, the former eventually learned to accept his best friend for the vigilante he had become. Unfortunately, we never got a chance to fully see how Tommy would adapt to having that new heroic version of Oliver in his life before he was killed and, as a result, we’ve spent the past six years wondering what Arrow would look like now if Tommy was still in it.

Oliver Queen can’t bid us all farewell without sharing one final sweet moment with his best friend.

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