20 Greatest Arrowverse Villains
12. Dante & The Ninth Circle
Originally set up as the head of Arrow season seven’s terrorist organisation The Ninth Circle, Dante was eventually revealed to be second to the syndicate’s real leader: Emiko Queen, Oliver’s newly-discovered half-sister.
Which is a damned shame, because Dante - played with a wonderfully dark, amused malevolence by former Highlander Adrian Paul - was a breath of fresh air: a sinister puppeteer that even Ricardo Diaz was scared of, physically more than a match for the Green Arrow despite a twenty-year age gap.
Why the Ninth Circle was sidelined remains a mystery. Emiko was just a combination of tired Arrow tropes: a Queen with a dark secret; a female killer with daddy issues; an evil archer as dark mirror to Oliver. And why would a centuries-old secret society that had financed wars and revolutions allow an unstable twenty-something assassin to lead them?
Dante, the Ninth Circle and his lieutenants Beatrice and Virgil are all names taken from the Divine Comedy, the classic poem depicting the circles of Hell, which in turn implies that these were titles or codenames rather than their own names. If that’s the case, we could be seeing a new Dante cropping up in Arrow’s final season. Here’s hoping he’s half as interesting as this one.