Arrow: Deathstroke almost didn’t become a regular character

Deathstroke’s very substantial and crucial presence in Arrow wasn’t part of the plan at the beginning.

After seven seasons, The CW’s bulwark of a show, Arrow, has grown to encompass an infinite Multiverse of characters and programming, affectionately known as The Arrowverse — even though the existence of other Earths was established mainly on The Flash.

But Arrow had very humble beginnings: it was about a lonely man in Oliver Queen who survived on an island for several years. There, he made friends and enemies with an assortment of unsavory fellows, including a Mr. Slade Wilson (Manu Bennett), aka Deathstroke. Our first introduction to him was seeing his black-and-orange balaclava mask on a stick with an arrow in one eyehole.

That was the first sign of the battles to come but, believe it or not, the showrunners originally never intended to go any further than that. Marc Guggenheim, who helped develop Arrow and acts as a consulting producer, revealed to Entertainment Weekly that Deathstroke’s mask was only supposed to be an Easter egg for comic readers, nothing more:

"“We had no intention [of] seeing Deathstroke or Slade Wilson [Manu Bennett] in season 1, and we saw them both.”"

The tease was the idea of pilot episode director David Nutter and writer Geoff Johns, who were both on set at the time:

"“David Nutter was on set [of the pilot], and he wanted basically a foreground element. He was like, ‘What can we stick here?’ and he had the idea of maybe something with an arrow through it. Geoff Johns happened to be on set and said, ‘Well, what if it’s like a mask, it’s half-black and half-orange, and it’s basically the Deathstroke mask?’ And we were like, ‘Oh, great Easter egg!’ because we were all about the Easter eggs back then.”"

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Guggenheim added that he and producer Greg Berlanti didn’t plan to introduce Deathstroke, as well as Roy Harper (Colton Haynes) or The Huntress (Jessica De Gouw). Although, all ultimately appeared in the first season:

"“Similarly, we had no intention of introducing Roy Harper [Colton Haynes] in season 1, [but] we saw him in episode 15. The Huntress being as early as episode 7, the idea that we would introduce another superhero character? Never part of the original plan for season 1.”"

Many more characters followed over the years who weren’t part of the plan, Guggenheim admitted. They threw caution to the wind and set up for as many future stories as possible because they learned valuable lessons working on two seasons of legal comedy Eli Stone for ABC:

"“Eli was always on the verge of being canceled, so we never said, ‘Oh, we’ll do that in season X,’ because we never knew if we’d get season X. So, we were like like, ‘We’re going to do it right now.’ And one of the things we took away from the Eli Stone experience was that was actually really to the good. It was great to be able to burn through story with abandon.”"

Slade stuck around for two seasons — in the present and flashbacks. He even donned the Deathstroke balaclava and colors to become the big villain of season two. Occasional cameos followed, but Wilson has largely been missing in action since season five.

Arrow began its eighth and final season this past Tuesday night on The CW. Interestingly, Oliver traveled to another Earth where he still was found on Lian Yu but, in place of Slade’s mask, was Batman’s cowl.