Season 7 of Arrow continues with the appearance of the Longbow Hunters.
1. WWGAD
With Ollie behind bars and Team Arrow disbanded, everyone is looking for what to do next. What is the right action to take? As Team Arrow matriculates into new careers (Diggle/Curtis at ARGUS, Dinah as Captain), their new jobs are bring up some ethical questioning of their old ones. A line of inquiry that all of them handle in their own way.
At the heart of the episode is Felicity’s hacker ethos brushing up against Diggle, Curtis, and ARGUS regulations. Diggle had already gotten out of the life midway through last season, and probably adjusted the best. ARGUS is an extension of his time in the military and Team Arrow, it just has a different command structure compared. Which is something Diggle is duty bound to respect, even if he bends it a little to try and find Diaz himself.
The majority of the episode’s drama is built around Felicity’s desire to capture Diaz, and get Team Arrow back together, while everyone else is trying to live their lives and carry on Ollie’s legacy in their own way. Emily Bett Rickards overplays things just a tad in some scenes, but does a good job of appearing both righteous and utterly wrong at the same time. She does stuff that would conceivably get Curtis fired multiple times. Hacking into things and asking questions later is maybe not the best thing to do from a government computer. Felicity is the shows emotional heart, and if she’s off the deep end in this way that could spell trouble in the long run.
Team Arrow isn’t Team Arrow anymore, the old ways are not working, so what is the correct move for her? Turning to the FBI is certainly a move, but as someone who rather enjoyed the way Sydelle Noel played her disdain for all of Team Arrow’s games, this has all the ingredients for some Odd Couple shenanigans.
In the lead up to the season premiere, Stephen Amell talked up the unheroic things his character was being forced to do to survive. There was a worry that this environment could force Ollie to regress to an earlier shoot first ask questions later mentality. After Brick leverages Ollie’s desire for information on Diaz to get him to remove that guard with the face we all recognize. That seemed to be the case, but Ollie did not turn back and handled things in a very Oliver fashion: by shanking himself. This is a character who acted as the ultimate sin eater for his group, all failure was in someway his fault, so stabbing himself so he didn’t have to hurt someone makes a lot of sense.
Meanwhile the Black Canaries are on their own hunt for Diaz and have a nice chat about the desire for quick justice versus the slow institutions they now represent.
Without Team Arrow’s consistent vigilantism normalizing everything they did, Arrow is showing a surprising willingness to question their previous state of being and how it has affected their present.
2. The Longbow Hunters
As the title of the episode suggests, the Longbow Hunters – first mentioned offhand at the end of last season – make an appearance pulling a series of jobs for Ricardo Diaz. The trio of assassins include
• Holly Elissa as Red Dart
• Michael Jonsson as Kodiak, who was the leader of the Shield Clan in ‘Outsiders War.’
• Miranda Edwards as Honor Guest aka The Silencer
Overall director Laura Belsey and episode scribes Jill Blankenship and Rebecca Bellotto did a good job introducing this trio. I wish we’d have gotten a bit more of them outside of pulling jobs, but that fits with how the show is restricting information on what it is Diaz is actually up to. Instead they were introduced as the recurring gimmick Dragon type characters they functionally are. Their opening heist did what it needed to do: show what these characters can do. Red Dart has a variety of darts. Kodiak has a buckler and is the heavy of the group. Honor Guest does as her name implies and makes things silent, this ability isn’t due to her being a meta like it is in the comics but some high tech gadgetry which feels like a very early Arrow way of empowering characters without making them Super.
Continued belowOf the group I want to see them use Silencer more, her powerset is the most interesting filmically. Dropping the sound out of things creates a heightened importance on reading the image and the scores job as musical accompaniment. They didn’t make things fully mute, but noticeable enough. Considering people complained about a few seconds of utter quite in The Last Jedi, dropping sound for extended periods on broadcast television is a bad idea.
3. Unrealistic Weaponry
Look, noting the unrealistic nature of weaponry in Arrow, or any action show really, is foolish. But Michael Jonsson is just so big and that buckler looks so small. Diaz having a flamethrower is similarly foolish but made things look cool.
4. Black Canaries
With Team Arrow gone, it opens up the show to explore different character pairings and force them to figure out reasons why they should all interact with each other. Pairing up Dinah Drake and Laurel makes a lot of sense in the new reality and worked in this episode.
Arrow is always a show looking for redemption, and seeing if Laurel can prove to Dinah she isn’t the kind of baddie she was before should be a solid recurring thread. Dinah doesn’t exactly have a clean ledger either.
5. Flash Forwards
When Older William and Roy were digging up something and it looked like they might of found a hatch, my heart skipped a beat. Go full LOST and somehow get the rights to use Spartacus footage, and fulfill my crazed fanfic!
Our second bout of flash forwards gave us more context about what exactly is going on. There appears to be a classic Island mystery afoot powered by ambiguous Ollie and Felicity Easter eggs, which I’m not exactly sold on. As previously stated these ‘C’ plots work best as thematic mirrors or reinforcement to the main thread and that didn’t really happen. If they aren’t going to mirror and tie into the present, these become effectively like a backup feature and those can take awhile to get going.
