There's plenty of reason to be excited about the return of Arrow this week. The series is coming off its best episode ever, a dramatic season finale that wrapped up Oliver Queen's five-year journey and left the majority of the show's cast in imminent mortal danger. And even though it's apparent now that the majority of Team Arrow will survive Prometheus' final attack, the stage is set for a drastically different sixth season. But if the series is going to take advantage of that clean slate, it's going to need to prioritize one character in particular - Black Canary.

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Black Canary has always been a particular sore spot for Arrow. The series has never given us a true, direct adaptation of the Black Canary of the comics. Instead, the Arrow writers have essentially fractured the character into pieces and spawned a number of different offshoots. There's Laurel Lance, crusading lawyer-turned-costumed vigilante. There's her sister Sara, a party-loving college girl molded into an elite assassin. There's Dinah Drake, a a completely unrelated character who just happens to have the right background and metahuman power to take up the Black Canary mantle. And that's not even counting Laurel's Earth-2 doppelganger, Black Siren, or Evelyn Sharp's brief tenure as Black Canary.Arrow has enough Black Canaries to build an entire team, but none of them replicate everything that makes the comic book version great. Much of what makes Sara such a valuable addition to DC's Legends of Tomorrow has less to do with her Black Canary ties and more with her ongoing struggle to redefine herself after her brush with death. Each version has shades of the classic Black Canary without truly doing the character justice.To be fair, there's no law saying the series has to pattern itself directly after DC's Green Arrow and Black Canary comics. Arrow has made a number of major and minor changes to the source material, some of which have wound up circling around and inspiring similar changes in the comics. But the lack of a singular, cohesive take on Black Canary is definitely a recurring weak point for the series. In particular, the show has been harmed by its lack of a lasting Green Arrow/Black Canary romance. Short of Superman and Lois Lane, there's no more enduring power couple in the DC Universe. That romance is easily the strongest element of either character. It makes them both better characters. It's no coincidence that DC's Green Arrow comic picked up in quality considerably once the DC Rebirth relaunch rekindled the passionate connection between Oliver Queen and Dinah Lance.At this point, fans may as well write off the possibility of Arrow doing justice to that romance. That ship has pretty much sailed, what with Earth-1 Laurel's death and the emphasis on Ollie and Felicity's relationship in recent seasons. We may never get a truly comic-accurate take on Black Canary in the Arrowverse, but the least Arrow's writers can do is settle on one specific take and stick to it. The Black Canary mantle needs to stop being treated as a revolving door for various female vigilante characters and instead treated as a permanent, lasting member of Team Arrow. Give fans a chance to connect with one version of Black Canary for a change.Unfortunately, it's unclear whether Season 6 will actually deliver on this need. Both Juliana Harkavy's Dinah Drake and Katie Cassidy's Laurel Lance (the Black Siren version) will be major players this season. As it is, Season 5 often struggled to give Dinah her proper due. The character often seemed relegated to the background as the writers focused the majority of their attention on the Oliver Queen/Adrian Chase feud. Will Season 6 do better by Dinah if it's forced to juggle both her and Laurel at the same time? Does the show actually need two Black Canaries when it so often struggles to handle one at a time?Hopefully, this season will finally do right by Black Canary and develop an interesting dynamic between Dinah and Laurel. There's potential worth exploring there, but doing so requires the writers to make Black Canary a more vital piece of the puzzle than they generally have in the past. It's fine if Arrow's Black Canary is different from the source material, so long as she's treated as every bit the vital character she is in the comics.

Jesse is a mild-mannered writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter , or Kicksplode on MyIGN