Arrow offered up its first issue episode in "Spectre of the Gun," which used an attack on Star City's City Hall to launch into an exploration of the gun control debate.

Including an issue episode into an otherwise more entertainment-focused season is something executive producers Marc Guggenheim and Wendy Mericle have been itching to do for a while now, and they entered into Season 5 with the intention to touch upon a more topical conversation. IGN participated in a group interview with the EP to discuss the goal with "Spectre of the Gun" and how it will continue to impact Arrow going forward (along with some other teases of what's to come later this year). Read selected quotes from the conversation below.This article contains spoiler's for Arrow's latest episode, "Spectre of the Gun."

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I shall tell ya. We went into Season 5 wanting to do an episode about an issue. Can I give you a little bit of background here? I'm old. So, what does this mean? This means that I grew up on St. Elsewhere and Picket Fences and L.A. Law. I grew up in a time where it was commonplace -- like literally every week -- for a one-hour drama to tackle the issues of the day. Somewhere along the line we got away from that, the whole industry got away from that. And now you have Black-ish and Carmichael Show, but as far as network dramas are concerned, really not tackling current events, current issues. We went into Season 5 with the desire to, like, OK, it's the fifth season.We've hopefully earned the freedom to. In 23 episodes of television, you can have 22 pieces of candy and one episode of vegetables. We sort of felt that gun violence felt like the right topic, a. because of its topicality but also because of the level of gun violence that is on Arrow. We could have done an episode on abortion, but that's not really where the show lives, so gun violence really felt like the right thing to tackle. We knew we were going to do it, we knew we would probably do it in the second half of the season just because of all the pipe-laying that has to happen in the first half of a season. I forget at what point we knew it was going to be [episode] 13.I think it was when we knew that we were talking about the mayor's office. There was an opportunity also to do an episode where he wasn't going to get in the Green Arrow costume. From a story perspective, it was really the challenge of figuring out what would an episode look like where we had to solve the issue of the day or the problem of the week with Oliver Queen as mayor as opposed to him gearing up as the Green Arrow. The other thing when Marc and I talked about doing it, when we talk about doing potentially more episodes like this going forward -- you know, still one serving of vegetables a season, but still -- going forward to do it again is the idea that you want to start a conversation. Simply, it's sort of what Curtis says in the episode, is it's important to at least talk about this. At some point we did get away from that, I think, as a country, and we would like the idea of hearing both sides and hearing both sides as fairly as possible.I think one of the things you’ll see in the second half of Season 5 is the gray area becomes a lot more gray. We’re really delving into the complexities of Oliver being a killer in a way that we’ve never done on the show before. Like, I think, a lot more nuance and a lot more - in the past, it was like “I’m a killer or I’m not a killer.” It was very binary. This year is - like you said, it’s super gray, and it’s really messy, and this is a component of it. This is a piece of it for sure. On the walk over here, Wendy and I were just talking about a storyline that, again, continues to make those waters muddier because it is a complex, moral decision, and in many ways, Oliver killing is the seminal moral quandary of the show.That was something I think that spoke to us as writers and spoke to the audience back in Season 1. Like “this guy kills people.” There’s a big part of the original pitch. We said “at the end of Act Two, he’s going to break someone’s neck.” One of the things we are doing in the back half of Season 5 is really getting underneath that and what that means, not just in terms of morality but in terms of psychology -- specifically Oliver’s psychology. There’s things about Oliver’s killing that you have yet to learn.How’s next episode sound?You know, it’s funny. For me, 14 is this fulcrum where a lot of the little seeds that had been planted in the first half of the season start to come to fruition, and you start to realize that oh, Prometheus has been setting up a chess board and the episode ends, I think, with sort of the next key move in Prometheus’ grand plan.Um, I'll be honest, I can't answer that. We have an idea for how to see her again, but we haven't made a deal with her. She's not a series regular anymore, so we have to make a contract with her and she has to be available. We haven't had those conversations. But we do have an idea. We know exactly what we do want to do. You now know more than Katie does in terms of her involvement at the end of the season.I'll just say, based upon what little—I try to avoid online, but it's online, so it's impossible to completely avoid stuff—but it seems like the general prevailing theories about how we're going to play that subplot off are wrong. That's kind of my impression. Everyone's expecting something we're not doing, for better or for worse.We really started the season wanting to have her go through some version of her own island in some way. I would say it’s going to get very interesting, and the team, they’re definitely going to have very strong opinions about it. We really wanted to take her to place where she would sort of understand Oliver in a more profound way. Without giving too much away, that’s what I would say about her and Helix.You definitely haven’t seen the last of Vigilante. In the episode “Vigilante,” I think we kind of pretty much told that story in terms of, how does Vigilante affect Oliver’s moral decision making. The role Vigilante has to play the next time we see him, it’s a little different than that. I don’t want to say too much.How do I answer that without spoiling? Obviously, I will say, I think anytime we do a reveal on the show, it’s always with the intention of not just surprising the audience, but also of resetting the board and resetting the characters’ perspectives, and the characters having a profound reaction to things. Hopefully, we’ll do that again. We always go into the season with a game plan, but we’ve certainly reached the point in the season where now our game plan is specific episode to episode to episode, as opposed to knowing what tentpoles we want to hit. I feel good about what our game plan is. We’re certainly reaching that point in the season where things probably just by happenstance become more controversial. So stay tuned.You'll see her again.But not in the way you think you're going to see her. It's going to be a pretty fun reveal.We're trying to throw as many unexpected things as we can without it turning into a crazy plot twist fest. We still actually have some surprises up our sleeves.

Terri Schwartz is Entertainment Editor at IGN. Talk to her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz