I’m continuing season five of Arrow. Oliver is assembling a new team to protect Starling city. While they are working to track down a new vigilante, the team finds a list of people he killed in season one. I thought one of them posed an interesting question: how do you tell the difference between a murderer and a hero, and who gets to decide?

The answer may seem obvious at first. Heroes fight for a just cause, even at personal risk. Murderers kill people for no good reason. The whole series has challenged this dichotomy. Oliver undoubtedly fights for a good cause—saving Starling City—but a question hanging over the show is whether he has done so honorably. He has killed in cold blood before and I have the distinct impression he will again. So we then have to ask whether you can be a hero if you pursue honorable objectives dishonorably.

Everybody will probably answer that question differently. I really appreciate how Arrow has allowed us to grapple with the question throughout the series. We see Felicity leaving Oliver because she couldn’t deal with his continued dishonesty even though she understood why he lied to her about having a son. And it was portrayed as a reasonable decision. Most effectively, we have the new team Oliver has gathered feeling palpably blindsided by the revelation that he had a kill list.

On the other hand, it’s clear that Oliver has repeatedly saved the city from destruction. It’s also strongly suggested at different points that a person who refused to bend his moral principles would not have been able to save the city. In other words, the only way to do the truly heroic thing—save Starling—is to act in ways unbecoming of a hero as we usually understand it.

I can’t wait to see how the series resolves the question of whether Oliver is really a hero.