After a week off, Arrow is back, with the season’s most densely packed episode.
1. Caitlin Snow and Cisco Ramon Join The Show
Two more DCU characters popped up tonight – Caitlin “Killer Frost” Snow and Cisco “Vibe” Ramon showed up as S.T.A.R. Labs scientists, and they look to be key players on The Flash should it be picked up. Neither character exhibited too many properties that would be dead giveaways to their identities, but this is yet another example of how much more tuned in this show is than Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. – you don’t need to debut a heavy hitter to make the fans happy. Hell, people are jazzed about a Vibe appearance! Throwing a bone to the long time fans, while creating “new” characters to be a part of the show’s expanded universe? How can you lose?
2. Laurel Gets a Clue
It really should not have taken Slade telling Laurel that Ollie is the Arrow for her to figure it out – it should come as even less of a surprise that the “woman in black” is Sara. But, the show has kept Laurel in the dark about their night-time activities up until now, and when she finds out, they deal with the fallout pretty quickly.
I forget who said this, but a friend of mine once hypothesized that most of Gotham, but especially Gordon, Bullock, etc, all knew that Batman was Bruce Wayne, but they kept quiet because it was better for everyone if he thought his secret was safe. That is more or less what Laurel chooses this week – she was going to keep Ollie and Sara’s secrets, almost as a “thank you” for all they do for the city. While not exactly a perfect development, storytelling wise, it feels like something true to her character, and works well enough.
3. The Roy Revelation Scene
This wasn’t exactly a shocking reveal, but it was one incredibly well handled. In fact, the entire sequence was handled just about perfectly – each action made sense, and yet was still unpredictable enough to make it effective. More than Roy being hooked up to the machine, the most interesting/powerful moment was Diggle shooting Isabel. It was a flashback to his soldier past, it was a powerful statement about both his care for Ollie and the importance of their mission.
4. Motivations
One of the elements of the show that really sets it apart is the way that each character’s motivation seems pure and logical. This week, in particular, Isabel’s past and her present dovetail in such a way that it makes her character far more logical. But Ivo, Laurel, Quentin, Diggle, even Felicity, all show how their personal motivations lead them to where they are now. For a show with a lot of mystery, why people do what they do isn’t particularly ambiguous. This could be read as an indictment of the show’s simplicity, but I disagree; this is a show that allows people the freedom to be who they are, and therefore, tell the most interesting possible stories about them.
5. Rebirth
The theme of the show, more than anything else, is rebirth. Obviously, Ollie and Sara came back “from the dead,” but even the minor characters have had moments of figurative death and rebirth. This week, Isabel has a very literal rebirth scene – organized by a man who was born again by mirakuru, after a man born again by mirakuru was rescued by a soldier given a chance to redeem himself for his past sins and a man who was thought dead for half a decade.
In fact, the only character on the show who isn’t living a different life today than they were in the early days of the show is Moira – and she appears to be trying to allow herself to pass through the chrysalis stage, but keeps being drawn back into her old ways. Nothing is more compelling than a redemption story – except, maybe, a show with a dozen of them.
