A mea culpa is needed – this review is a day late. Wednesday night, the New York Mets clinched a spot in the World Series for the first time in 15 years, so I was a little busy celebrating to watch and write about Arrow. And then, I had a sick kid home yesterday. So, long story short – here’s my review. My bad!
1. Nanda Parbat
While The Flash has certainly nailed the comic book tone and fun perfectly, Arrow remains better at dropping subtle hints and teasing endless possibilities about the world at large. Tonight, we got our umpteenth visit to Nanda Parbat, and this episode both picked up tendrils from last season, as well as adding some new wrinkles into the overall storyline around the al Ghuls and Lances.
The biggest bit, obviously, is that Sara is alive again, restored by the Lazarus Pit. We see her have the same animalistic reaction to the Pit that Thea had, but worse, evidently due to the fact that Sara was already dead – and long dead – by the time that she was brought to the Pit. I have to give the show credit: they produced a truly creepy corpse for Sara. Was it a little cheesy? Yeah, it was, but so is the show. It looks like what the CW thinks a partially decomposed corpse would look like, and that’s just fine. Or, it looked like Calista Flockhart, which says more about Mrs. Harrison Ford than it does about the CW’s prop department.
Malcolm Merlyn seems to be thriving as the new Ra’s al Ghul, and has seemingly imported his barber from Starling City to remain on call, because the dude still looks sharp. He doesn’t seem as hell-bent on doing evil as the prior Ra’s was, but he also isn’t setting up the Little Ghul Urban Achievers either. The League of Assassins seems to be, more or less, same as it ever was under his watch.
Of course, now he has to do it without the Lazarus Pit, as it has seemingly been turned into…pink rock? Nyssa says that her father took precautions with the Pit, which is weird for any number of reasons, and so this is Ra’s raising a middle finger to Merlyn from beyond the grave. Merlyn, obviously, is pissed off, but I can’t see this being the end of the Lazarus Pit once and for all – especially because, if Merlyn is at all like Ra’s in the comics, he knows of other Pits as well.
Merlyn remains just as cagey and duplicitous as ever, promising to help Thea get healing from a “sage in the mountains.” This is what I mean about Arrow‘s ability to tease things so well. This is a nod to Vic Sage, the Question, who has a long relationship with Nanda Parbat, and got fans like me excited to see a faceless man show up. Of course, he was lying, and so we will likely never see Vic on the show, but that little excited twinge was worth it.
A final little note – supposedly a few months in Nanda Parbat has turned Malcolm Merlyn into Kunu, no longer wearing a watch. That’s the only reason anyone raised in a society with clocks, who still has access to clocks, would say they are leaving at ‘first light.’
2. Why not the Tattooed Man?
Tonight’s villain was Jeremy Tell, aka ‘Double Down.’ If you expect him to be a sandwich with fried chicken for bread, you’d be gravely mistaken. No, he’s essentially a less interesting (and more white) version of the Tattooed Man. The Tattooed Man is one of the characters that DC really decided to put some umph behind in the late 90s/early 00s, and he went from a two bit villain to an anti-hero of sorts – and a really interesting one of that.
Double Down isn’t that – sure, he was still manipulating his tattoos – only of playing cards, mind you – but his motivation as a hired hand is nowhere approaching interesting or different in this world. There are numerous parts about Tattooed Man – he’s a father, he has a moral compass – that make him far more interesting. Plus, I don’t know why a show wouldn’t want to increase its diversity, instead of making yet another white villain with a beard the freak of the week. We’ve seen a lot of these, and the show deserves better.
Continued below3. Just when you thought Diggle’s mask couldn’t get any dumber…
…it has retractable eye shields. Ick.
I will say this about Diggle this week – they’re really trying to give him something to do. Sure, they’re giving him motivation only through his dead brother, but at least it is something Diggle-centric for the show to focus on, instead of just having him brood in the corner. He and Oliver making up is nice, too, as pissed off Diggle is even less interesting than ‘entirely too forgiving’ Diggle than we got this week.
I still think the show hasn’t found the right way to use him yet, but at least they’re trying.
4. Terrific
Curtis Holt has been a great addition to the show already, and this week his likability spiked through the roof. He may be second only to Felicity right now on the ‘characters I love seeing on screen’ rankings, and that’s quite the ascent. Plus, everyone can check ‘t-spheres’ off the Arrow Season 4 bingo card now!
One note that isn’t expressly Holt-related, but is tech-related, so it gets lumped in here, is Felicity’s weird Matrix phone. This was something straight out of Hackers, and the show should know better than that. Oh well.
5. Speed Weed
There is a writer/producer on this show named Speed Weed. I noticed it during the premiere, but forgot about it again until this week. Best or worst name ever?
Sound off in the comments, friends!
