Welcome to the backend of Arrow: Season 2! The new year started off with quite the jam-packed hour, so let’s get to it!
1. The Villains
It is always impressive just how many villains Arrow can shove in one hour, even when most of them don’t feel like they’re the bad guys. Executive producer Marc Guggenheim had this to say to Comic Book Resources earlier today:
To the extent that we have a ‘Northern Star’ on the show in terms of bad guys, it’s to always make sure that every villain is the hero of their own story. For us, that principal means that there’s no villain who feels like they’re a villain. They all think that they’re perfectly justified and everything they do is right in its own way.
Tonight, we saw four (let me say that again – four – Ivo, Slade, Shrapnel and Blood) villains occupy airtime and, with the exception of Ivo, all of them had at least a flimsy justification for what they were doing. The show has excelled at making sympathetic monsters out of the villains – in fact, for most of tonight’s episode, if Laurel wasn’t snooping around, Blood would have seemed like the hero of the story.
2. Lots of Balls in the Air
My wife asked me how the show was tonight, and I thought about giving her a recap, but then realized just how hard that would be. Besides the island flashbacks, the main storyline, following up on Barry Allen, the “Roy dosed with Mirakuru” plot, a little Queen family drama, a little Lance family drama, an squabble between Ollie and Felicity, and a healthy dose of Blood for mayor stuff, this show packed a ton into an hour.
That said, it never feels like plotlines are being dropped or neglected – Officer Lance even took a second to talk about his arm, injured in the last episode, just to remind us of what happened last year. There is some serious juggling of storylines here, and most of it is successful.
3. The Movement
An interesting bit of writing made Shrapnel part of “The Movement,” described on the show as a borderline terrorist organization. This is interesting for a few reasons: first of all, it is the first purely New 52 concept brought into the show. But more than that, it is the first time that the show has flipped a character or organization’s intended designation.
In Gail Simone and Freddie Williams’s “The Movement,” the titular organization is one that fights for good against a corrupt city government/police force. Here, the same basic idea is presented, but the Movement are villains. Is this a situation of television executives being more conservative, and therefore more anti-populist, than their comic equivalents? Is this strictly a personal opinion by one of Arrow‘s writers/producers? Or is this the start of blurring the lines even further between hero and villain on the show?
4. Mirakuru as MacGuffin
Sure, the Mirakuru is important to the overall story – it made Slade the villain he is, it gave Roy powers, it set the entire course of this season’s island activity, but ultimately, it is a device that allows the writers to do things in a simple, and interesting way, that simply wouldn’t be possible without it.
Slade is a better villain than hero, but he’s a better corrupted compatriot than he is straight monster. How do we get him from friend to enemy? Mirakuru!
Roy is a petty thief and Thea’s boyfriend. How do we get him more connected to Ollie? Mirakuru!
We want Solomon Grundy, but we don’t want to involve a swamp – how could we do that? Mirakuru!
I have to say, it is a pretty ingenious device, and has been used sparingly enough where it doesn’t feel overkill. Yet.
5. Felicity as Oracle
One of the things this season has been great at is distinguishing Ollie from what we’d expect a show about a young Bruce Wayne to do. He is relying more on his archery, he is developing his cast of characters that feel unique, and he is not just going against C-level Bat villains. But there is one character that is eerily similar to one in the Bat-verse: Felicity.
The internet-connected hub of information for one (soon to be two) heroes, working out of a secret location? That’s Oracle, baby. And what better way to bring Barry and Ollie into a greater love triangle/hero’s motivation angle than having Felicity put in danger – perhaps, shot? Confined to a wheelchair, perhaps?
Stranger things have happened.
Feel free to disagree, agree, or post your favorite theories in the comments.
See you next week!
