‘Arrow’ season 3 spoilers: Colin Donnell will return as Tommy Merlyn; but how?

For all of you who still pine for the days on “Arrow” when Oliver Queen has a definite best friend in Tommy Merlyn, we come today bearing some good news: You will be seeing Colin Donnell again on the show this season!

However, don’t think he is coming back from the dead, or that he was never really dead at all. Speaking per TV Guide in a new interview, show boss Andrew Kreisberg confirms that this is going to be an interesting story to tell from Oliver’s life in Hong Kong many years ago:

“Colin Donnell is coming back in Episode 302. Tommy will be in the flashback story. We’ll be telling the story about how Tommy and Oliver just missed each other in Hong Kong. It’s a really amazing story and we’re so excited to have Colin Donnell back. It’s one of the advantages of the storytelling that we do that even when you die in the present day, you can still be alive in the flashbacks. It was something that we had talked about last year and then when we committed to doing the Hong Kong story, we knew we could really make it work.”

To us, we love the idea. It would make sense for Tommy to be in Hong Kong at some point given his lifestyle, and this is a nice way to show us just how close Oliver really was to his former life without even really knowing it. What’s also great about this is that there are still other opportunities for other dead characters to turn up in such a way. Who knows? Maybe the Moira Queen story also is not completely over. (We hope there’s at least one more appearance, given that we really loved this character on the show.)

If you want to see all of our other news and highlights now about this potentially-excellent third season, just be sure to head over here, and to get more news via email, sign up now for our CarterMatt Newsletter.

Photo: The CW