Oliver decides to take his future children on a working vacation. It’ll be fine, what could go wrong infiltrating a mob fight club and trying to run an arms deal? Also they get to meet Uncle Anatoly, that might be awkward for William.
1. From Russia with Love
Whenever I talk about Superhero comics and their various generic shenanigans, for both good and ill, with my non-comics reading friends there is always this bemused look on their faces. As a multilayered generic space – so much so that I’d argue it shouldn’t be considered a genre but an aesthetic/verb – anything seems possible. Arrow has taken a common sci-fi trope, time travel (or is it just time displacement?) and used that common plot device for the better, as “Prochnost” leans into the absurd conceit of what if your adult children from the future came by for a visit to explore the emotional sore spots within the Queen family as Oliver gets a rare second chance to be a father.
Team Arrow, thanks to Curtis, has discovered that plans for something they could use against the Monitor are in Russia while the material they need to power it is in Bialya. Oliver decides to take the kids and Laurel with him to Russia while Diggle and a partner acquire the material. In Russia things don’t go as smoothly as planned. Partly due to Oliver’s want to shield his kids from some of the darker things he has done in his life, mainly his affiliation with the Bratva and the sadistic tendencies they helped developed. What starts out as a fun working vacation becomes far more heated as his isolated children keep acting like their Father (ignoring authority) forcing Oliver to contend with the selfish desire within him to only show them his “good” side after being a pretty terrible absentee Father all their life.
I keep referring to them as “kids” or “children,” it is infantilizing. They are not infants, they are grown adults. But they are when Ollie sees them, that moment of raw emotion is wonderfully played by Amell. This whole time travel thing is throwing him for a loop. When he last saw William it was off to the Grandparents home. Mia was still a baby when he left with the Monitor. And now here they are in their mid-twenties. This is the kind of moment that is earned through the use of time travel, a scenario that forces a character to confront how they view the world around them and the dissonance perception and reality can bring.
Ever since Team Arrow really became a thing, the show became a family melodrama (as most long running superhero things often are.) The final season has taken that a bit more literally and for the better as this episode sees Oliver deal with the biological family he never thought he’d get to meet and Laurel decides to stick with the one she found.
2. Like Father Like Daughter Rd 2.
The opening teaser, a training montage between Oliver and Mia that justifies the cool tennis ball bit from the pilot, is Ollie showing her his good side. The trainer who is explaining his methodology without shunning those around him. It’s the kind of moment I’d wish we had gotten more of when Thea and Roy were new to the team. Mia needs that sort of tactical refinement, but she also needs to see all of her Dad.
Anatoly speaks of it is about teachers doing what is necessary fo the student to learn. It echoes what Yoda says in The Last Jedi about showing the student your failures as the greatest teacher, so that they may become what they grow beyond. What Mia needs most from her Dad is a lesson in failure, Ollie knows plenty about that. Laurel serves that role to a degree in this episode, having another Cool Aunt talk with Mia. The episode ends on an adult conversation as Ollie opens up and accepts his children for the adults they have become. It is a hopeful moment to end on, but one I wish we could’ve gotten more of.
3. Ring the Bell
Continued belowThis episode brings a reiteration of one of the Bratva induction process from Season 5 that Oliver repurposed as a training program: Ring the Bell. Now it is Mia’s turn to ring the bell, now with a time limit. This was just a wonderfully done sequence, that mostly unifies cinematic time and actual duration. There was a palpable feeling of desperation and energy as Mia worked her way through those thugs and came up just short.
4. Family
With the appearance of New New Team Arrow, the efficacy of Team Arrow has been called into question a sort of micro-existential crisis for the larger macro-Crisis that is coming. It has spurred Team Arrow to try and make changes now, with the lingering question fo the “timeline” left unspoken thus far. Diggle’s recruitment of Roy back on to Team Arrow, in a blatant attempt to change the timeline, makes that question ring louder by its absence. Trying to make things line up in time travel stories is never a fun or fruitful exercise, focus instead on the emotional growth that device allows.
Leaving Roy out in the cold would not be a very Team Arrow or Arrow thing to do, assuming they could get the actor back. Stopping Roy, for now, from going to Lian Yu and exiling himself out of guilt is a real bright spot. Also maybe it’ll force Arrow into a Back to the Future like scenario which could be fun.
5. Layla
One of the things that has made Batwoman so interesting is Caroline Dries willingness to just do things sooner rather than later. Last nights episode of Arrow does something similar as Layla is revealed to Team Arrow to be working with the Monitor. That was the sort of reveal that I expected wouldn’t happen until an episode before the crossover, which is three episodes away. Now we have plenty of time for Diggle and the rest of Team Arrow to deal with her deception. You’d think as members of Team Arrow they would be used to that by now, they’ve stuck around Ollie through this before.
