Arrow Producers on Who's in the Grave: "Dead Is Not Goodbye"

On Wednesday, Arrow will finally reveal the identity of the person in the grave.

As The CW drama's fourth season premiere revealed, someone close to Oliver (Stephen Amell) and Barry Allen (Grant Gustin) has been killed by Damien Dahrk (Neal McDonough). Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards) was later ruled out, but every other member of Team Arrow remains at risk.

Although Arrow producers Marc Guggenheim and Wendy Mericle promise this death won't be a fake-out, they did say it doesn't necessarily mean the deceased won't appear again, whether it be via the Lazarus Pit, parallel universes or time-travel.

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"Dead is not goodbye," Guggenheim told reporters at a press screening on Monday. "We definitely recognize across all three shows [Arrow, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow] that when we kill off a character, it means something different now. I'm not going to put a qualitative judgment on whether it's more or less impactful. ... But certainly, we acknowledge that there's a difference. And Arrow, much more so than Flash or Legends, it traffics in death. For better or worse, death is part of the show. What we're finding, as we're pushing into Season 5, [is] the show has to evolve; it has to change. And the concept of death is evolving and changing, as we've already seen with Sara Lance."

But before the deceased has an opportunity to potentially return, Arrow first has to explore exactly how this loss affects the rest of Team Arrow.

"I will say that the episodes we've written in the aftermath are devastating and they're meant to be. We wanted to explore that and to really have everybody feel the impact of this loss," Mericle said. "It's a game-changer in a very sad way in that we're losing a beloved character, but also in the sense of big moves like this will open up new storytelling avenues and will force our characters to rethink their decisions and rethink their objectives."

Arrow airs Wednesdays at 8/7c on The CW.

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Additional reporting by Megan Vick