Slade’s close to putting the finishing touches on his project, but he has to get a little more hands on first.
What They Say:
The Man Under The Hood – An epic battle ensues when the team find Slade waiting for them in the lair; The reaches her breaking point; Laurel struggles with a secret.
Content:
Suffice to say, Arrow manages to make sure that each episode has a lot going on and there are regular twists and turns along the way that keeps the cast from getting comfortable. Sometimes this can be good since it means you never know what’s around the corner and what little twist is going to come into play. But it can also cause the series to feel like there’s no real hope for something good to happen for the characters as well as they’re continually struggling. With Oliver having had his company swiped out from under him in a moment of duress, putting it now in Slade’s hands, and then having Slade reveal to Laurel that Oliver is the arrow, his somewhat solid footing has slipped away completely from him. While these are important things, more so because of how it affects others, there’s also that rather good belief that after all that Oliver has gone through since ending up on the island that he can handle the strain of it. And in some ways, there’s some good potential there for him to extract from the wealth and power that can be problematic.
With all of these changes in the air, we get some nice action at the start as Oliver and the group make an incursion into one of the Queen Consolidated facilities to cause a little trouble, which is using Felicity’s plan that has its comical moments. But it also does some good referencing since it has them using the Clock King’s skeleton key to get it done and we also get Felicity realizing she’s now a bomber. THey do make it as safe as possible by not letting anyone get hurt, but it also puts them in a difficult position since they know they’re doing the right thing to stop what Slade’s doing in creating a powerful army similar to what he’s capable of. We’ve seen it seeded throughout the season and with what happened to Roy and his attempts at gaining the final pieces he needed through Queen Consolidated made a lot of sense and played well, though obviously Oliver is going to resist. And you can see Slade viewing that as part of the fun.
While there’s a lot going on here, especially with how Queen Consolidated has been lost and Oliver and his family have to shore up their assets since the stock is worthless, we do get to learn that back during the island days, there’s a way to deal with the Mirakuru drug. With a captured Ivo revealing that there is a cure for the drug, that gives us a bit of hope to work off of that Oliver may have a plan that didn’t work in the past but may work now for him to deal with. And it’s one he’s going to need sooner rather than later since Slade is making everything very, very personal these days. Not only has he taken out his financial interests and laid a bomb on Laurel that can impact him in a big way, but he’s also striding right into the team’s lair and attack them there, making it clear that he can utterly destroy them at any time. There’s the obvious that Slade really did train Oliver with everything he knew, but there’s a good gap of time from when they parted ways that has Oliver likely learning a whole lot more that Slade wasn’t aware of.
As Slade goes on in gaining the things he needs, swiping the skeleton key off of the group, it brings us to an interesting research facility that has a great little nod to it as we learn of Arthur Light, aka Doctor Light, who gets referred to as a psycho here. This ties in a touch with some other storyline material and a nice nod towards some of the STAR Labs characters that will appear in the Flash pilot. That gives Slade more of the equipment he needs and it also keeps Oliver and the rest one step behind him. Since we lost the Barry material we were originally going to get in the next episode, it’s nice to see the inclusion of the other characters here as it helps to tie the two series together just a little bit more. And I also have to just get a little stupidly geekily happy about the whole Doctor Light reference, especially since they went for the one that I like the most from the various incarnations of the character.
With all these movements as Slade gets what he needs, there’s a lot to like with it since it puts the team on the reactive side instead of proactive, though there is a plan. But we do see that Oliver is forced to constantly react, which is fun to watch since he’s getting a lot of thing thrown at him. The big one for me was his conversation with Isabel as he tries to figure out why she’s doing this, having been told by his mother that Isabel was one of his father’s mistresses. As it turns out, Isabel and his father were a whole lot more, to the point where he was very close to leaving all of them behind but ended up being drawn back in. That’s bad enough and puts an interesting spin on Robert after all this time, but we also get the reveal that he knew that Thea wasn’t his daughter by blood and still did everything he did for her anyway. That’s a rough blow for Oliver since he believed that nobody besides Moira and Malcolm knew which is why they could accept certain things. But this changes a lot. And while Thea doesn’t know yet about that part of it, she’s still struggling with the whole situation since she’s realized that both Tommy and Oliver are just her half brothers and that she had the hots for Tommy for quite a long time and almost got somewhere with him, which just wigs her out.
While Oliver is obviously struggling with a lot of things, Slade is still definitely his primary focus and he’s finally getting closer to him. So much so that he finally finds one of the places that Slade is working out of where he’s cycling in the blood transfusions and Mirakuru to create what he needs. To make it worse, he’s got Roy there, which Isabel found over in Bludhaven in a completely empty state after Oliver pushed him away, which will make him potentially an ally of Slades depending on how things go. Luckily, we get some good fight sequences here, an area of the season that has definitely improved a lot over the first, and the brief bit between Slade and Oliver is nicely done, especially with Slade’s cockiness. But while things go relatively well here overall in the rescue of Roy, you’re left wondering just how far things went with Diggle and Isabel since her place in the series feels a little less secure at the moment.
In Summary:
Like just about every episode of this season, Arrow has a whole lot going on and continually changes the status quo. There’s down time to be sure from time to time, but for the most part it keeps moving, doing, growing and changing. With this episode, we get more direct confrontations between Oliver and Slade that are only going to grow as Slade gets closer to achieving his goals. The fallout from Isobel taking over Queen Consolidate is starting to be felt in a more personal way but it leads to some great reveals about the past and what it means. And we even get a couple of nice crossover moments with Central City and STAR Labs that nudges the whole Barry in a coma subplot that’s been going on. Touch on the past a bit on the island while also mixing in a bit of Lance family drama that figures into the bigger picture, especially with Laurel starting to realize more about what Sara is up to, and everyone gets their time in the spotlight, even if just for a few minutes. Definitely building towards a big season finale that feels like it’s going to reshape the course of the series for the next season.
Grade: A-
