A few times this year, Arrow Executive Producer Marc Guggenheim has suggested that the series was unlikely to use metahuman characters, since the existence of The Flash gave The CW's Arrowverse plenty of outlet for those characters to shine, and the identity of Arrow was so tied up in the gritty, real-world aesthetic established in its first season that having too many fantastic elements would likely hurt the show.

In a new interview with CBR, though, it appears as though Guggenheim is changing his tune somewhat.

"What's fun about episode 8 for Arrow is it proved to me, as a writer and a producer, hey, you know what? You can do metahumans on Arrow without feeling like the show is changing its tone too much," Guggenheim said. Both Arrow and The Flash crossed over with the other show for their eighth episodes, which will air on December 2 and 3. "It's something that we all sort of collectively realized -- hey, the show can handle that. So that's kind of cool. I might have to amend my earlier comment from the beginning of the year, just because this kind of works."

What does this mean for Ray Palmer and his A.T.O.M. exosuit? Time will tell.

“I think anything is possible. My instinct is that if Ray Palmer’s going to shrink, he’ll probably shrink on another show,” Guggenheim told reporters back in October. “With The Flash in existence, there’s no real compelling reason for us to do super powers on Arrow. We can bring characters to Flash to have super powers. We have plans for Ray that don’t involve shrinking, but our plans for Ray are actually really cool.”

We'll see more soon, surely. Arrow airs on Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW.