Arrow Season 5 has shifted the status quo for our titular hero, Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell). After his team disbanded at the end of Season 4, Oliver has been attempting to clean up the mean streets of Star City solo for six months — both as the Green Arrow and as Mayor of Star City — but the dual jobs have been taking their toll.

In last week's Season 5 premiere, Oliver finally acknowledged that he probably needed some help in his quest to save his city, which will lead to three new members joining Team Arrow alongside Oliver and his former fiancee/current tech guru Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards): Curtis Holt (Echo Kellum), Wild Dog/Rene Ramirez (Rick Gonzalez) and Artemis/Evelyn Sharp (Madison McLaughlin).

Arrow showrunner Marc Guggenheim spoke to Mashable about the show's new recruits, Oliver's tumultuous relationship with Felicity and what we can expect from mysterious new villain Prometheus in Season 5.

Echo Kellum as Curtis Holt, Rick Gonzales as Rene Ramirez/Wild Dog, Madison McLaughlin as Evelyn Sharp, Stephen Amell as Green Arrow and Emily Bett Rickards as Felicity Smoak Image: Bettina Strauss/The CW

A lot of Oliver’s focus at the top of this season is going to be teaching these new recruits — how does he balance that with his responsibilities as mayor now that he seems to be taking that office more seriously?

Poor Oliver, nothing goes easy for him — nothing goes as planned. He certainly goes into episode 502 thinking, “I’m gonna be able to spend more time being mayor because I have this team that’s going to be helping me out,” and as always, Oliver discovers that things are a little bit more complicated than that.

It's a given that Oliver will have trouble whipping the newbies into shape, but what can you preview about the dynamics between the three of them as a team? What kind of interactions are you enjoying writing towards?

Certainly I think writing for Rick Gonzalez’s character Rene has been a lot of fun, because he’s such a loose cannon. He could give a f*ck about Oliver. He doesn’t listen, he doesn’t take orders well, and we know from four years of experience how Oliver reacts to something like that. Evelyn is such an interesting character because, A: we’ve got the history that comes from her involvement in [episode] 419 but also the fact that there’s a lot about her background that we don’t know. There’s an interesting mystery that is present in her character. And with Curtis, he’s got the longest road to go — he’s not vigilante material. He’s got the Olympian background but he probably still has the most to learn and the furthest to go in terms of being a vigilante, and we’re going to try and honor the reality of that as much as we can in a superhero show.

How much will you be drawing from previous iterations of Artemis in the comics or cartoons in helping to flesh out Evelyn's character, now that she's assuming that mantle?

We’re trying to take some inspiration from Artemis’ look for her costume. It’s tricky because we decided we wanted to go with Evelyn as opposed to a brand new character for Artemis, but we’ve established this character as Evelyn, not as Artemis, last year, so we’ve got to be careful in terms of not violating anything we’ve established for the character before.

In the Season 5 premiere, we saw the promise that Laurel (Katie Cassidy) asked Oliver to make; how much is that vow to find a new Black Canary going to be weighing on his mind this season?

Forefront in his mind is this notion of recruiting this new team, and as the season progresses, eventually it will turn Oliver’s attention towards the specificity of that promise of a new Black Canary, and we’ll have to see what happens.

It’s been announced that Laurel will be back on the show in some form around midseason — what can you tease about Katie’s return at this early stage?

I will say it’s really been wonderful watching her in dailies again. I’m excited about our plans, but midseason is so far off, I have to be particularly stingy in terms of details.

How is the guilt from the destruction of Havenrock going to affect Felicity moving forward?

Guilt is one thing, but it’s hard to dramatize, so what we’ve chosen to do is to personalize it. The notion of Havenrock becomes a very concrete, personal story for Felicity that is different from her just moping around or feeling bad for herself. We have come up with a way to put a face to that tragedy, and it’s a face that Felicity will have to confront head-on.

She's also romantically involved with Detective Malone, as we saw at the end of 501; what can you say about their relationship?

My best comment on that is that you’re gonna want to read my forthcoming book, How to Piss Off the Entire Internet. [Laughs.] At the end of the day, I love our fans, we have incredible fans — they are so passionate and I love their passion. Even when they’re angry at us, it’s still passion and still engagement with the show, and that’s great. Where I tend to part ways with some fans is, I write for the kind of viewer I am, I suppose; when I watch TV, I just want to be entertained.

I recognize with social media and everything, that’s not enough for some fans. Some fans — not all of them, but some — don’t want to be entertained, they want to have influence on their entertainment. I think for better or for worse, we don’t write for those fans. I think the fact that we did put Felicity in a relationship… we’re not idiots, we knew it probably wouldn’t go over well with a segment of the fandom, but that can’t be why we don’t do something.

Why did you feel it was important for you guys to give Felicity and Oliver time apart after last season?

For one thing, we wanted to honor all the stuff that we did last year — we did break them up, so if we did just get them back together immediately, it would A: render Season 4 kind of meaningless, and B: it wouldn’t be true to the characters. If anything, there was a criticism that I actually do agree with, that we broke them up a bit too quickly last year, and some of the plot turns happened a bit too fast in terms of the emotions, and I own that — I don’t disagree with that. But the way to solve that is not by doubling down on the actions that brought about the criticism.

So again, you ask yourself as a writer, how am I dramatizing this? One of the things that happens in a relationship is eventually someone moves on, someone’s gonna date first. And when that happens, then you have a story. We’ve said this countless times over 100 episodes going into five seasons: We go where the story takes us. We do something because we realize we have a story to tell. There may be someone who raises their hand in the writers' room and goes, “wow, some group of fans are not gonna be happy with this,” but we do it anyway. We’ve had to do it on a personal level where, every time we decide to kill off a character, that’s us doing something far worse than pissing people off on our Twitter feed, that’s us affecting someone’s livelihood.

Stephen Amell as Green Arrow and Emily Bett Rickards as Felicity Smoak Image: Bettina Strauss/The CW

For better or for worse, we are very consistent in our approach, which is, we are trying to tell the best stories we can tell, and we go where the stories take us. Sometimes we take the stories, but we’re following our best artistic intentions, and we don’t do it with regard to who we’re pissing off, and the corollary to that is sometimes people think we’re doing something to cater to certain fans, but we’re not doing that either. All we’re trying to do is tell the story we’re trying to tell, and to do it in the best way possible. And believe me when I tell you that’s hard enough — it’s hard enough to tell these stories and do 23 episodes a year of any quality; we’re not taking on the additional responsibility of trying to piss people off or trying to avoid pissing people off.

We've seen villains who've wanted to unmask Oliver in the past, and we've seen villains who are archers, so what makes Prometheus different from the foes Oliver has faced so far?

It’s a little hard to answer without revealing too much about Prometheus, so I’ll have to be a touch vague, but we couldn’t have done this character in Seasons 1-4. We kind of had to wait ’til Season 5 in order to do this character, so that alone makes the character very different. Yes, he uses a bow and arrow, but as we start to see in future episodes — and he already used three different weapons in 301 alone — he’s busy; he’s not just an archer, he’s got so many other tricks up his sleeve. They’re not magic tricks like Damien Darhk, but the character’s backstory and his raison d’etre and mission statement are all things that could only be done in Season 5.

Arrow airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on The CW.