'Arrow' Season 7 Spoilers: 3 Ways Malcolm Merlyn/John Barrowman May Return

That Lazarus Pit sure is handy. Malcolm Merlyn, the deceased “Dark Archer” and former leader of the League of Assassins, will return later this season on The CW’s Arrow in a capacity yet to be revealed.

During the Torchwood panel held at the Supanova Comic Con & Gaming Expo in Brisbane, Australia, actor John Barrowman (who starred in Doctor Who and Torchwood as the immortal Captain Jack Harkness) told the Australian crowd that he will return for an episode of Arrow later this season.

It is unknown how long and in what capacity Barrowman’s return to the series will look like. So it’s anyone’s guess if Malcolm Merlyn is actually still alive, will undergo some sort of resurrection, or, as Arrow has done multiple times, simply feature the character in flashbacks, hallucinations, and even doppelgängers with characters (namely the Human Target) pretending to play old, familiar faces.

While the Arrowverse has an exhausting history of characters returning for varying stints after being killed off, the return of Barrowman’s Malcolm Merlyn is especially interesting. In the show’s sixth season finale, Malcolm died in an act of sacrifice to save his daughter, Thea (Willa Holland) on Lian Yu, the island where Ollie (Stephen Amell) became the Green Arrow.

Unlike other characters, Malcolm Merlyn once had the Lazarus Pit under his control. In both the comics and in Arrow, the Lazarus Pit is a mystical pool of enchanted water capable of healing and even resurrecting people from the dead. The Lazarus Pit was destroyed in Season 4, but nothing in Arrow is powerful enough to stop a television writer’s room.

Arrow airs Mondays at 8 p.m. Eastern on The CW.