By Mike McCarthy
Since the mid season premiere of Arrow, we have seen a lot of changes. The not knowing if Oliver is alive, how close are Thea and Merlyn and what will happen with Ray Palmer and Felicity. It all begins with us finding Oliver half dead laying on a ridge after his battle with Ra’s al Ghul. Not sure if he is alive or dead, the team back in Starling are moving forward as if he will be returning victorious. Roy and Diggle are out on the street taking on a new villain in Danny “Brick” Brickwell (Vinny Jones). While the team is taking on thugs, Laurel has put her new boxing ability to use. Laurel is mostly just getting in the way of the team so far, but is she is doing her best to fill in as her sister’s replacement.
Felicity is having the hardest time coming to the conclusion that Oliver could be dead and is not returning. After Malcolm Merlyn returns to the Foundry with the sword that Rahs put through Oliver’s abdomen, she finally understands that he may not be coming back. The team strongly debates stopping everything that they have been working so long for cleaning up the city. Not sure what else to do with herself, Felicity tries to bury herself in her new job, and doesn’t want to assist Ray in his attempt of the nano-suit.
As we see someone dragging Oliver’s body over snowy grounds, we see that it is his old friend, Maseo. He has brought the body to a home where he asked his wife, Tatsu to save his life. Last we saw Tatsu, she had been kidnapped by Amanda Waller and A.R.G.U.S demanding that Maseo and Oliver steal a half of a bioweapon known as Alpha for them. China White already had the matching half, Omega and Waller is trying to keep them from being sold together on the black market. While Oliver is on the mend, Maseo must leave and return to the League of Shadows before Ra’s figures out that he saved his life. Something that is becoming pretty evident is that Waller is a crazy vindictive woman. She is threatening both Maseo and Oliver’s families if they don’t go through with the mission.
One thing that has me scratching my head over the past few episodes is that, Thea and Captain Lance have both flat out told Roy, that they know it’s him in the Red Hood. Now if they knew so emphatically it was Roy, how could they not know that Oliver is in the Green Hood? Thea I can understand, since her and Roy were together, but even Lance knew which baffles me. Thea should’ve known by before now that the Arrow was Oliver. He interrogated her in her new apartment, and his voice isn’t that different even with the condenser.
Oliver finally makes his way back to Starling after a few weeks of recovering from his injuries. He returns to find Laurel trying to replace Sara and is obviously pretty pissed off about it. He keeps telling her that she doesn’t belong out there, and from some of the fights she has been in, she definitely doesn’t. She spends more time on the ground and is taking way too many hits to be actually effective, for now. Trying to fill in for a trained assassin when you have only been taking boxing lessons for a few months can be quite difficult. She could hardly defend herself, but will eventually become the real Black Canary. Now will the show follow the older comics, where Oliver and Dinah Laurel Lance fall in love and are together, or will Felicity and Oliver be the future?
Oliver has finally come out and told Thea that he has been the Arrow this whole time, after Merlyn told him she needs to know. She completely flipped the script on what everyone thought she was gonna do. She thanked him for everything he had done in the past for other people. I thought she was gonna flip out and shut him out, but I was pleasantly surprised with how the writers have set this up. Instead of being upset with Oliver, she cast out Merlyn for all of the lying he had done and all of the problems he had caused in their lives. She knows everything that is going on with Malcolm and the League hunting them and generally wants nothing to do with him anymore.
On the most recent episode Thea and Oliver are training for the battle with Ra’s on Li an Yu. After going for a walk to the underground prison that Slade is being held, Oliver finds that he has escaped and killed the guard. Oliver runs back looking for Thea and finds her gathering wood for the fire. When they are about to leave or the plane, Merlyn calls on the sat phone and tells him that he released Slade from the prison to test Thea and Oliver and get him back into the killing mind-set. While trying to escape the island, they are confronted by Slade and locked into the prison.
Being a very exciting episode there is definitely some really emotional parts. Oliver keeps avoiding talking to Thea about Sara, after she keeps bringing it up. She can tell he is hiding something and finally he caves. By telling her that she was actually the one who killed Sara, and whatever trust that she had in Merlyn was gone. Confronted once again by Slade, Thea pulls a gun on him and has to be talked down by Oliver, convincing her that she is no killer and if she does kill Slade then Merlyn wins.
The flashbacks brought Oliver back to Starling to find the Alpha weapon and was threatened by Waller to be killed if he does anything to try and contact his family or the media. We see Thea buying drugs at the graves of Robert and Oliver Queen and getting busted by Tommy Merlyn. The whole flashback shows what the team and main characters were doing before Oliver had brought them all together. Diggle and his brother Andy are bodyguards at Tommy’s birthday party, Felicity brings a file to Maura Queen’s office while Oliver is taking data from her computer and Laurel is dragging her drunken father out of a bar. The way that it brings the original team members together in the episode and in one way or another were all in the vicinity of Oliver when he was in Starling is a great retrospective.
These past few episodes have shown what the other characters, besides Oliver are really capable of. Between Laurel fighting with the team and finally telling her father about Sara being dead, Thea finding out about the secret, and Oliver going back to the island, it has been action packed and emotion filled. There hasn’t been a whole lot of continuity between show and comics, which is perfectly fine. I know some purists don’t like when that happens, but it adds a whole new layer to the world of Green Arrow and DC Universe in general. Personally I have only ever seen Ra’s al Ghul in the Batman comics and movies, and am not sure if he ever had anything to do with Oliver, but I love that he is part of the Green Arrow world. Bringing in big characters from other worlds of DC is a fantastic way really get people involved in more than just the Green Arrow comics. Between the crossover with The Flash, the Atom being a part of the show now, the sky’s the limit of who else may make appearances. There have been questions about more Batman characters crossing over, but with Gotham out there that probably will never happen. With the announcement of Supergirl coming out by the same writers of Arrow and Flash, the more crossovers the better and definitely welcomed.