So your kids, who you never expected to see again, from the future suddenly appear right in front of you, what do you do? This being the DCWverse I’d wonder what did Barry do to the timeline this time. But that’s after you give them a warm hug and just accept and enjoy the time you have with them.
1. Hey Dad
Stephen Amell received a fair amount of heat for the acting choices, being stoic and unemotive, he made in the early seasons. It was a mixture of an understandable affect and the show just figuring out how to be. As they both matured and Amell was allowed to open Ollie up, he’s shown not so much great range but an enjoyable subtlety in how he comports himself. Sure he can do a big cry, but it is the smaller moments that made me think Amell could be more. From the scene he came clean with Sebastian Blood or when his Mom told him she knows.
That subtlety was on display in the opening act of “Present Tense” as Oliver is miraculously greeted by the, adult, children he left behind. Most of Team Arrow is created by their future children. Katie Cassidy in the previous episode had staged the stinger to echo the moment Oliver and Moira were reunited in S1 (or well I guess this season too). “Tense” director Kristin Windell continues that staging and expands on it. Amell’s reaction to seeing his children, the shock and just profound acceptance as Adult William hugged him and than proclaiming them to be “his kids” was just heartwarming stuff.
Their Convergence was something I’d expected would happen eventually, just not in the fourth episode more like an episode 9 or 10 deal right before Ollie goes off to die. I’m glad we’re getting more time with them.
2. Breaking Down the Larger Conflict
The presence of New New Team Arrow serves a wonderful purpose for the season as it enters the half way mark: it reframes the larger macro conflict (the looming Crisis) in to a smaller micro conflict that is more immediately understandable on an emotional level (if this Crisis or the future of Star City 2040 happens my children will be harmed.) That latter concept is so much easier to grasp and understand for the audience and far more emotionally devastating than any destruction of Earth-2 or Thanos snap ever was. In Endgame the thing that made the Thanos snap actually work was the first twenty minutes when we got to see how people reacted to living The Leftovers.
Reframing the conflict in this way also helps to situate it in the never ending battle of DCWverse vigilantism. Their children come from a future and tell them, Star City sucks and is some how worse than the present. Not only is their vigilante tactics historically ineffectual, they are themselves co-opted (Rene) into the corrupt influence they currently stand against. And they’re all pretty much terrible parents. The only ones on Team Arrow who come out looking good are Aunt Felicity and Laurel, because they’re the cool Aunts you go to when your parents abandon you.
In typical Arrow, and super heroic fashion, they take this proclamation of fate and decided to fight against it. Now Rene knows what not to do. Now the Canaries might appear earlier than expected along with Nightwatch. It’s the same basic stand that Hickman framed the finale to HoX-PoX around, with everyone standing in solidarity to work towards preventing this latest proclamation of a Dark Fate. All of this happening as the latest Terminator movie fails to even meaningfully register at the box office is somewhat funny.
(Side Note: Laurel and Dinah sharing a French fry dipped milk shake together was a nice echo of Earth-1 Laurel and Nyssa’s relationship in S3)
3. Take Your (Future) Kids to Work Day
So, yours and your teammates future children suddenly appear from 20 years in the future. It must be another day that ends in ‘Y’ for Star City. As Rene puts it, at least Diggle didn’t throw up this time (although I worry for his blood pressure once the Crisis begins proper.)
Continued belowA recurring point of tension for me in the season thus far has been how plot dense these episode have been. Structurally they aren’t all that different from your typical episode, but there is a ramping of stakes and need for forward momentum that can feel like a bit much a bit fast. “Present Tense” doesn’t have that issue, as reframing the larger seasonal conflict in more phenomological terms gives the episode (and the next several hopefully) a solid emotional core to fractally build everything around. They explicitly remix the finale to season 2, sadly without the cool clock tower, but the conscious remixing does not serve to be the point in and of itself. It serves as a point of differentiation from the past and hope that they can truly change the future.
4. Like Father, Like Daughter and Son
The sins or legacy of the parent weighs heavily on everyone in this episode. Oliver gets to be, or has to be, the Father they never had before he even had a chance to e that Father they never had. Diggle must deal with his apparent failures as a Father to his biological son while the adopted one shows him how good a Father he can be. Rene deals with the no longer abstract sorrow of knowing your child will one day die. Grant Wilson, yet another failed son of Slade Wilson, comes to Star City preaching faux populism as means of reclaiming and rewriting the madness of his Father fo personal gain.
The opening acts of this episode are predicated on New New Team Arrow unknowingly doing something their parents would’ve done in their younger years: lie by omission and not be forthright and honest about stuff. Luckily their parents have moved on from such foolishness and will hopefully teach their children the same.
Getting to see Ollie interact with Mia was highly entertaining, Amell and McNamara have a surprising chemistry together. She was is basically just acting like the Amell of S1-3 as she stubbornly proclaims a role of leadership by blood/ownership without the deeper understanding of what it entails. Ollie trying to save his daughter from repeating some of his worst mistakes was surprisingly redemptive for the show.
Meanwhile Aunt Laurel gets to be the cool one who encourages Mia’s rebellious behavior, and laying ground work for that backdoor pilot.
5. The One Thing I Don’t Quite Buy
There is one thing I don’t quite buy in this episode, Ollie and Felicity instinctively knowing that William is gay. Of course they’d totally support and accept him, but they just also weren’t really in his life like at all even when he lived with them. One of the recurring motifs around the Queen-Smoak children was how their parental abandonment shaped them in some potentially negative ways, they weren’t traditionally “good” parents. William has openly wondered if Ollie’s abandonment affected how he has treated his various boyfriends over the years and given him a moody-broody problem solving complex. Ollie being like “we knew” seems like an attempt to retroactively make them appear better that I don’t quite buy.
There was some hints, due to the nature of the present-flash forward structure, that William the Younger wanted to tell them but it was mainly one moment. About an episode before he got shipped off to his grandparents never to be seen again.
Still getting to see William talk about that with his Dad is one of those moments I didn’t expect to get now or ever in Season 8, and that was nice.
