'Arrow' season 5 spoilers, plot news 2016: The New Year brings new crises to Team Arrow

The midseason finale of "Arrow" season 5 left almost everybody's fate on the balance. How will Team Arrow cope with the changes that are sure to come when the series returns next year?

Oliver (Stephen Amell) failed to stop this season's big bad, Prometheus, when the latter staged a situation wherein Oliver's alter ego, the Green Arrow, ended up killing Billy (Tyler Ritter) instead. The fallout from this scene alone may prove to be huge and rather scarring, especially for Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards) who has just lost her new boyfriend in the hands of her ex-fiancé.

How will this affect the dynamics between Oliver and Felicity, both as crime fighting allies and friends? Will Prometheus eventually use this incident to try and lure Felicity away from her team like he did with Evelyn (Madison McLaughlin)?

Curtis (Echo Kellum) also got a taste of the holiday blues when his husband, Paul (Chenier Hundal) chose to move out of the house after he found out that Curtis had been working with the Green Arrow all this time. Two other game-changing events happened during the final seconds of the previous episode: the apparent arrest of Diggle (David Ramsey) and the return of Laurel (Katie Cassidy). How will these events affect Team Arrow in 2017? And could Ra's Al Ghul's (Matt Nable) other daughter, Talia (Milli Wilkinson), be responsible for Laurel's return like some fans are speculating?

On the other hand, citing a promo for the next episode that was exclusively released on The CW App, iDigital Times suggested that the Laurel who came back to the bunker may not be the same Laurel that Team Arrow have come to know, but could instead be her villainous Earth-2 version, Black Siren.

The scene from the promo takes place in a prison, where Oliver and Diggle are talking through a glass panel about Laurel's return and Felicity and Lyla's (Audrey Marie Anderson) quest of finding Claybourne's (Garwin Sanford) wife, believing this to be the key to finally bring Prometheus down.

"Arrow" season 5 is set to return for its second half next year in January.