Arrow Season 4 certainly stepped up on villainy from the previous year with the addition of Neal McDonough’s Damien Darhk, but Season 5 will of course require a brand-new big bad to complete Oliver’s five-year saga. To wit, the first details of the new series regular villain have arrived, teasing a charming contemporary to Oliver with a tragic past and a propensity to snap a few necks.

Where the third season of Arrow explicitly name-dropped Damien Darhk as a clue to the next big bad, it remains to be seen if the final four episodes of Season 4 will afford the same treatment to our Season 5 villain, titled on casting calls as “James,” and likened to an “irrepressibly charming” contemporary of Oliver’s. TVLine scored the first details of Star City’s new foe, described as “a man on a mission” and “out as he is to avenge a tragic, violent loss from his own, years-ago past.”

Open to physically threatening actors of any ethnicity in their 20s or 30s, “James” must also seem to:

… just as easily shake your hand as your best friend or break your neck as your worst enemy — and you never know which one is coming. Either way, he’s more than capable of having a good time as he does it.

That … could really fit any number of existing DC characters, if indeed we’d presume the role as a villain from the comics (and be still my beating heart to one day see Arrow take on The Batman).

We’ll see if Arrow Season 4 lays any additional groundwork, but who might our new Season 5 big bad be, and will he have any ties to reported flashbacks in Russia?

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