All September long, IGN is highlighting the best TV coming your way in the 2019-2020 season . Today we're featuring Arrow , which is set to begin its eighth and final season in October. The series is undergoing its most dramatic status quo shift ever in Season 8. Oliver Queen is coming out of his short-lived retirement to join forces with the Monitor and prepare for the coming Crisis, a conflict he's been told will lead to his own death. Along the way, the series will revisit the most popular characters and conflicts from the past seven seasons, even as it also continues exploring the future of Team Arrow in the year 2049. We recently had a chance to chat with showrunner Beth Schwartz about the final season and how it pays tribute to Oliver Queen's legacy in the Arrowverse.

It's safe to say Arrow has never seen a more drastic status quo upheaval than the one being introduced in the upcoming Season 8 premiere, "Starling City." Oliver Queen is no longer the costumed protector of Star City; he's now a hero who holds the fate of the entire multiverse in his hands. Arrow is going big in its final season, and that includes bringing back many of the actors who helped shape the series over the past seven years.

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Arrow: Season 8 Gallery 11 IMAGES

Every Character in the Arrowverse's Crisis on Infinite Earths Crossover 23 IMAGES

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Case in point, check out our exclusive image from "Starling City" below:It turns out Adrian Chase and Tommy Merlyn aren't the only long-dead characters returning to the spotlight in Season 8. Oliver's mother Moira and archenemy Malcolm Merlyn are also coming back.As you might expect, Schwartz wasn't able to reveal how these characters are returning. The photo above seems to suggest Ollie may be visiting an alternate Earth where Moira fell in love with Malcolm rather than Robert Queen, but we'll have to wait for the season premiere to learn the answer."All I can say is that it's something we've never done on our show before, and we're going to see a lot of familiar faces in a different way than we've done on the show before," Schwartz teased.Schwartz did say bringing back Susanna Thompson and John Barrowman was a definite priority given how integral both actors were in the early seasons of Arrow. "We wanted to get everyone back who basically made the show the success it is, and those two characters were definitely both pivotal to the series."In the past, executive producer Marc Guggenheim has described each episode of Arrow's eighth season as "a love letter" to a past season. Schwartz confirmed "Starling City" is a throwback to Season 1 in many ways (particularly the pilot episode) though she also said "there's also a little mixture of a couple of seasons in that first episode."Arrow has always been focused on Oliver Queen's evolution as a character. Stephen Amell's narration in the title sequence always refers to Ollie becoming "something else," whether that transition involves him becoming a ruthless vigilante, a noble hero, a politician, or even an imprisoned felon. We asked Schwartz how that never-ending evolution plays out in Season 8. Is Ollie a superhero on a mission, or is he a man confronting his inevitable end?According to Schwartz, it's a little of both. "He's proving to be the ultimate hero. I mean, he started Season 1 as the anti-hero. He was killing people, for the greater good, but he was still killing people. And so going from Season 1 all the way to Season 8, he's proving to be that selfless hero that he always hoped to be. And we're bringing back all the characters throughout the season who have helped him get to that point."Even as Season 8 focuses on Ollie's last and most important mission, Arrow will continue to focus on the rest of Team Arrow and the newer generation of heroes introduced in Season 7's flash-forward storyline. As we learned at Comic-Con , Diggle and Lyla's son JJ will be the main antagonist in Season 8's flash-forwards, where he's revealed to be the leader of the ruthless Deathstroke Gang.Schwartz teased the flash-forwards will feature a brand new wrinkle of their own, one that could leave the door open for future storylines even after Arrow wraps up. "We are doing something cool with the flash forward stories that .. there's definitely more stories to be told. But again, there's more stories that we could tell for Arrow for probably 10 more years as well."With the way each episode of Arrow: Season 8 pays tribute to a past season, we were curious how much the overall structure of the series will change leading up to December's "Crisis on Infinite Earths" crossover. Is there more of a standalone approach to Season 8?"There's definitely a serialized story, but I would say that each episode is its own huge event and they take place in different settings," said Schwartz. "Which is different from previous seasons, we're mostly in Star City, where some episodes we'll go somewhere else, but this season we're in a different location in every episode."Arrow's eighth and final season premieres on Tuesday, October 15 at 9pm ET/PT. To help tide you over, watch the cast of Arrow reminisce about the series' best moments in the video below:

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