Arrow is back from its winter hiatus. Good news
first: This is the strongest episode for Laurel in a very long time. She’s
lively and sneaky and fun to watch, and her storyline actually—wait for
it—helps advance the main plot. Congratulations, Arrow writers. Job well
done. Please keep it up.
Bad news: Well, pretty much everything else, but chiefly
this: Oliver, you are such a dick.
We pick up five weeks after the events of last episode:
Barry Allen got hit by lightning, Roy got injected with the mirakuru
serum, and, back on the island, Shado got shot in the head. Sorry, Shado. I
still feel crabby about that.
Let’s deal with the island flashbacks first: Slade and
Oliver bury Shado and squabble over who should keep her leather hoodie. Neither
seems to want it, so maybe they should’ve just buried it with her? Oliver wants
to fill Slade in on the true circumstances of Shado’s death, i.e. that Ivo
forced Oliver to choose to save either Sara or Shado. Sara thinks this is a
terrible idea, as Slade has become increasingly unpredictable and dangerous
since being injected with the serum. Slade wants to head after Ivo to avenge
Shado’s murder; when Oliver tries to stop him, Slade manhandles him a little,
then takes off on his own with the supply of the serum taken from the Japanese
submarine.
Present day: Barry’s in a coma. A heartsick Felicity camps
out at his bedside in Central City. Oliver, made especially pissy and prickly
by her absence, has been unsuccessful in his attempts to uncover the identity
of “the man in the skull mask”, i.e. Sebastian Blood. Now that he’s close
friends with Oliver, Blood throws a party at Verdant to launch his mayoral
campaign into high gear. Laurel, who is still popping pills on the sly, attends
the rally as Blood’s date. Secretly, though, she’s been investigating his ties
to cop-killer Cyrus Gold. She’s got a very bad feeling about Blood, and may I
just say, it’s nice having Laurel be one step ahead of Oliver for once?
Poor woman’s been spinning her wheels all season, doing nothing in particular
except feeling bad about herself; she could use the confidence boost.
Laurel tries to wheedle information about Blood’s shadowy
past out of him. She observes, with a glaring lack of tact, “You talk a lot
about being an orphan, but you don’t talk about your parents.” Blood obligingly
fills in the gaps: His mother shot his abusive father and skipped town. It’s a
grim tale, and I don’t mean to be unnecessarily pedantic, but when one of your
parents is still alive, maybe “orphan” isn’t the word you’re looking for?
Still suspicious, Laurel snoops around his office and
discovers he’s been paying the medical expenses of someone named Maya.
The generic villain du jour turns out to be some dude
with strong anti-government views, a penchant for lobbing homemade bombs all
over the place, and a habit of delivering monologues to the camera to explain
his motivations. He’s played by Firefly’s Sean Maher, who is squandered
in this underdeveloped and poorly-written dust-particle of a role. After the
bomber blows up a downtown building, Felicity hurries back to Starling City to
help Oliver and Diggle track him down.
Team Awesome: Roy’s been all wild-eyed and squirrelly since
Blood kidnapped him and injected him with the mirakuru serum, so Thea
corners him in Verdant’s stockroom and tries to get to the bottom of what’s
spooking him. As so often happens with these two beautiful, adorable kids,
conversation falls by the wayside, and they end up enthusiastically grinding
against each other instead.
Bless you, Roy and Thea, for having the closest thing to a
healthy romantic relationship on this show, and for being the only characters
who seem to enjoy cutting loose and having fun now and then.
Before their hanky-panky gets too far underway, a box filled
with glassware falls off a shelf and lands on Roy. A huge chunk of glass embeds
itself in his forearm. “That looks really deep. It might need stitches,” says
Thea. She follows this up, terrifyingly, with, “I’m going to go downstairs and
get the first-aid kit.” Roy, you’ll recall, spent half of last episode with a
big fat arrow sticking out of his thigh while avoiding professional medical
attention. Ah, Starling City, where the hospitals are so awful (as we
saw in the fourth episode of this season) that Thea would sooner stitch up her
boyfriend herself than send him to the emergency room.
Quentin Lance and Oliver, as the Arrow, hold a clandestine
meeting to compare notes on the bombing. Lance gives Oliver blast fragments to
analyze, then asks for a personal favor: Suspecting that a fellow cop tipped
Cyrus Gold off to the raid that resulted in the deaths of multiple officers, he
wants Felicity to pull the cell records for everyone in his department.
Their rooftop tête-à-tête is interrupted by another bombing.
Felicity traces the signal of the phone the bomber used for the detonation, but
the bomber scrambles it before Oliver can close in on his location. Oliver is furious
about this. He chews out Felicity, accusing her of being distracted by her
concern for Barry. It’s clear from the context of his remarks he’s deeply, poisonously jealous of her
relationship with Barry.
It’s a pretty gross scene.
Hey, Felicity? Let’s sit down for jumbo margaritas and talk
this out: Oliver is a dick, particularly where you’re concerned. He has, above
your very loud and well-reasoned protests, damaged your future career prospects, he was incredibly foul to you after you saved his life by
letting Barry in on his secret identity, and he’s being emotionally abusive to
you right now. That he’s doing this because he’s jealous of Barry even though
he’s made it clear he has no plans to become involved with you just makes it
grosser. My advice? Leave. Quit. If you still want to leverage your formidable
tech skills in the service of fighting the rampant crime in Starling City, join
the SCPD; I’m sure Quentin Lance would be happy to vouch for you. Oliver isn’t
worth it.
Digg shares my opinion of this nonsense. Good man, Digg.
Speaking of Quentin Lance, there’s an awesome little moment
at the police station where he mentions to Officer Daly that: a) his arm
injury, sustained during the fight with Cyrus Gold that killed several of his
fellow officers, has been hurting a lot lately, and b) he somehow lost his pain
pills. Yeah, that’d be the pain pills Laurel was cheerfully popping earlier in
the episode.
Oh, Laurel, Laurel, Laurel. Laurel. Man. Laurel.
In the wake of the bombings, Sebastian Blood announces that
he’s going to throw a big, public rally to show the bomber that Starling City
isn’t scared of him. Oliver thinks this is a Very Bad idea, and I swear, this
is the only moment in this whole damn episode where Oliver and I are on the
same page.
The bomber, naturally enough, immediately plants bombs all
around the rally. As Felicity works frantically to disarm them, the bomber
pulls a gun on her, shoots Digg in the arm (he’s fine! Just a flesh wound!
Doesn’t even slow him down!), and detonates one of the bombs before Oliver
manages to apprehend him. In the resulting chaos, a humongous piece of heavy scaffolding
falls on Moira. Roy shields her with his body, then hoists the scaffolding out
of the way. He tries to insist to a flabbergasted Thea that his burst of
super-strength was just an adrenaline reaction, but Thea, noticing that his
wounded arm has already healed, clearly suspects something odd is going on with her boyfriend.
Back at the lair, Oliver apologizes to Felicity for his bad
temper. This scene is… still pretty gross. Filled with meaningful looks and
long-suffering sighs, the usual. In the first season, fans got behind the idea
of a potential Felicity-Oliver hookup because Oliver’s dynamic with Felicity
was so refreshing in comparison to his dynamic with each of his bona fide love
interests: Laurel, Helena Bertinelli, McKenna Hall, Shado. Felicity was fun.
She was lively, and smart, and snarky, and she seemed totally immune to
Oliver’s charm (or “charm”), which was a nice change of pace from the mopey
drippiness that seeps into every romantic pairing on this show (except for you,
Roy and Thea. You two rock. Stay gold, kids, stay gold). So the writers and
producers apparently got the wrong end of the stick and started shoving
Felicity and Oliver together at any cost, stripping all of the fun out of their
dynamic in the process. And now? Mopey drippiness.
Still pursuing her investigation of Sebastian Blood, Laurel
tracks down the mysterious Maya to a mental hospital, where Maya is a patient.
She’s also Blood’s mother. Per Maya, Blood killed his own father, then arranged
to have her falsely institutionalized.
Middling marks for this episode, overall. The whole
Evil-Midnight-Bomber-What-Bombs-At-Midnight plotline was pretty lame, the
island plotline lost the momentum it had gained in recent episodes, and this Felicity/Oliver
business is rapidly turning into a big, foul, stinky mess. However, the weak
parts were at least partially mitigated by Laurel’s tentative foray into
awesomeness. Sebastian Blood’s plotline, also, has been consistently handled
well. And Roy, like Slade, now has dangerous-and-almost-certainly-damaging
superpowers. Should lead to some interesting developments down the road.
Comments
I did love Roy and Thea, as usual. And I want to see where Roy's going to go with his powers. And Laurel did have more to do, and it is cool that she's figuring out Blood is bad news way faster than Oliver. But overall, not so thrilled with this ep.
I don't mind unlikable main characters. What makes me uneasy, though, is I get the impression the writers don't mean for us to find Oliver unlikable. And yeah, his whole apology scene made it worse. Nasty undercurrents of "I only treat you badly because I care so much about you."
Ugh. Yeah, at this point, I want to see present-day Slade causing big trouble for Oliver. That'd perk things right up.