Well, this episode shook up the status quo, doubled down on a very important theme of the season, and featured some light Hippocratic malpractice. Read on, but beware that spoilers are found below.
1. Her twin sister? Of course!
I’ve made it quite clear that I give somewhere between zero and one fucks about the flashbacks on the show. There’s nothing particularly revelatory, especially from this season’s Hong Kong flashbacks, aside from introducing Maseo in the show and, at this point, the Maseo of today and of 5 years ago are pretty different people.
But pulling out the “Shado has a twin sister” routine felt just shy of Beerfest on the ridiculous sibling scale. It is especially ridiculous because, again, Shado was only ever a means to an end – she was designed to make Slade turn on Ollie, that’s it – so to bring in her sister as some sort of symbolic piece of Oliver’s past that he needs to figure out, well, frankly, the audience (or, at least me) just doesn’t care. So why waste our time with it? This is especially true with this episode, as it was chock-full of important stuff, the least important of which was Ollie thinking he ran into an old flame.
2. So that is how Ray will be able to shrink down
Let’s be real here guys – Felicity is my boo, and Ray ha been a huge breath of fresh air for the show, but there is almost nothing I wanted less than a Felicity’s mom vaudeville show, and that’s what most of the hospital sequence was in this episode. She puts on a slutty dress, fakes some sort of cramping injury, and overacts so much that I’m surprised Mark Hamill and Paul Blackthorne don’t come over and kick her ass for encroaching on their territory.
What this episode did do, besides have Felicity take science, medicine, and her boyfriend’s life into her own hands and, without awaiting instructions, just stabs Ray’s neck with nanobytes of his own creation and hopes for the best.
At least Ray having access to the nano tech gives him some sort of shortcut to becoming the Atom that shrinks down, not just the Atom that flies through the air acting like an NSA operative.
3. Number of series regulars that don’t know Oliver’s identity: 0
That’s not a joke – every single person who is a regular on this show knows that Oliver is the Arrow. Now, I understand that, from a writing perspective, if you want a show that features both superheroics and CW drama, you need to make the secret identity a big part of the story, and if you (like these producers) have a disdain for inventing ways to keep his secret identity, well, a secret, I can understand the desire to fill more people in. But, c’mon now, at this point, the only people who don’t know Oliver is the Arrow are the people that he killed in the first season, and they only don’t know because they went out and got themselves dead.
Either this is going to resolve with Oliver’s name being cleared again (yawn), or they’re going to embrace the late ’00s “Green Arrow,” and just have him be totally outed, with the whole world knowing who he is. I vote for the latter, but really, I’m not particularly a fan of either approach.
4. Roy’s sacrifice: good idea, or incredibly dumb idea?
So, Ra’s al Ghul told Quentin that Ollie is the Arrow, something he already suspected. Then, he goes and outs Ollie on TV. Then, Ollie, more or less, confesses to him or, at least, doesn’t really deny being the Arrow. So, when Roy steps forward and allows himself to be arrested, isn’t it about a day too late to matter? Won’t this, essentially, just mean that instead of one member of Team Arrow being in jail, now there are two? Or, does the Starling City Police Department have a policy that if someone admits to a crime, all other suspects are immediately cleared?
Continued belowI do think that this is good for a few reasons, however: 1) it gives Roy something to do, 2) it sets up tension between Thea and Ollie, which I think works very well for the show, 3) it gives us less ‘post-coital time in Roy’s hovel of an apartment’ scenes, 4) at least they didn’t put Diggle behind bars.
5. Is there anyone that can talk to Detective Lance at this point?
Lance is so far down the rabbit hole of despair and a false sense of justice that there is almost nothing that could talk him off of this path. Except, there is one thing; one thing that would introduce a major plot point to the League of Assassins plotline, and would also solve a riddle that is plaguing Arrow: they could put Sara in a Lazarus Pit.
Hear me out: all of this started because of Quentin’s (totally understandable) meltdown at Sara’s (second) death. If Sara was somehow alive again, he might come down off of this conquest. But more importantly, this would also solve the “who is Caity Lotz playing in the Arrow/The Flash spin-off question – she’s still playing Sara.
Plus, it would eliminate the need to have Laurel be the most awkward crimefighter in the known world, it would give Lotz something interesting to do, as the Lazarus Pit would obviously change her (see Todd, Jason), and it would change what death means on the show.
I don’t think this is the best decision, mind you, as it opens up a ton of potential issues later down the road – why not just resurrect Moira, or Tommy, or Abe Lincoln? But I think, with the show painted into this corner, it is the way out that makes the most sense.
Lambaste or declare me king of Arrow in the comments!
