This week on Arrow: Jack Harkness does not like the poor. Spoilers below!
1.) Hey new flashbacks!
Rather than do the usual flashbacks to Ollie’s stint on the island, this week focused on that cabal of evil business leaders Ollie has been fighting all year. It’s pretty refreshing to not go back to the Island, especially after some of the more recent episodes felt like the writers lost ideas for what to do for The Island each week, and we get some much needed exposition on who these guys manipulating Starling City are. One revelation being that one of the evil businessmen is Ted Kord!(?!?) Hopefully this change will lead to more diverse flashbacks (a full episode that is just a flashback about Diggle’s history with Deadshot would be greatly appreciated.) Until then, we get…
2.) John Barrowman’s Evil Master Plan
John Barrowman is very concerned about the crime in Starling City; his wife was murdered by criminals and as such he wants to clean up The Glades. So how will he accomplish this? Build a rec center? Pour money into the police department so they can hire a second detective? Oh, he’s just going to burn down The Glades and kill thousands of people so they can rebuild the neighborhood from the ground up? Yeah no that didn’t escalate at all. Malcom Merlyn’s plans sound like he read the Wikipedia synopsis for Zack Snyder’s Watchmen and figured that would be more effective at cleaning up the neighborhood than investing into rehabilitation centers or something. To be fair, it’s incredibly entertaining seeing every businessperson in the room go “Oh, set the poor on fire? Yeah we can do that.” The only dissident is Robert Queen who has a pretty cool scene with Malcom where we see some of Merlyn’s God complex. So it may not be the most sensible evil plan, but at least it’s a fun one that fits with the character.
3.) Starling’s Creek
As part of the flashback scenes, we also saw Ollie in the days before he went on the yacht trip that would lead to him hanging out with Deathstroke. Namely, he was dressed like an early 90’s teenager with the body of a thirty year old who signed on to play a rugged badass, not 90120. Nothing incredibly interesting happens, it’s mostly Ollie and Laurel talking about loving each other which was sort of cute even though Laurel causes me to fall asleep sometimes. In the end, it was just a few scenes trying to set up the chemistry between two characters, and their actors, who really have none.
4.) The Main Plot.
Over on the main plot of this episode, Ollie was trying to track down Walter, who turned out to be dead, then turned out to be alive. Felicity, who is so much more closer to Black Canary than Laurel is, infiltrated an illegal casino to find information on him and demonstrated that she is one of the few characters on this show with any charisma, Zooey Deschanel by being completely sassy when thrown out for card counting. Then, Ollie tracked his mother and Malcom and found out that they are tied into the bigger conspiracy too, which will lead to hella family drama next episode, and tracked Walter from their conversation. The plot in this episode was alright, the only real problem being how I completely forgot Walter was missing until ten minutes into the show.
5.) John Barrowman is really fun.
All throughout the series, the only actor who has really been doing a consistently good job as been Barrowman. Even though it’s still hard to think of Malcom Merlyn as anyone else but Captain Jack Harkness, he’s been able to build his character and pull him off as more than just “EVIL BUSSINESSMAN!” Even though the plan to burn down a whole neighborhood seems ridiculous, his scene with Robert talking about the night his wife died really sold the motivation. Plus, in the beginning Robert says that Malcom can’t play God and create a natural disaster. Later on, the look on Merlyn’s face when he does exactly that by making the sinking of The Queen’s Gambit is perfect. Most of this show I would classify as “alright” but John Barrowman is just really great.
Review Score: 7/10 – A really good use of flashbacks mixed with a middling main plot.
