“Arrow”; starring Steven Amell, Katie Cassidy, Davide Ramsey, Emily Bett Rickards, Colton Haynes, Manu Bennett, and Paul Blackthorne; airs Wednesday nights on the CW at 8/7C.
Warning: This review will contain spoilers.
“Arrow” returned this week after a brief hiatus for the Sochi Olympics, and as this show is apt to do even after the shortest of breaks, it returned with a bang!
Oliver is on the outs with his mother, Laurel is holding a grudge against Sara and spending ninety-percent of the time intoxicated, and Felicity is struggling with Sara being the newest member of “Team Arrow”. All of this while William Tockman (“The Clock King”) is on a crime spree across Starling City!
The big baddie for this week was “The Clock King”. A villain who is terminally ill and trying to raise money for his sick sister during his last bit of time he has on Earth. He is accomplishing this by stealing a skeleton key that can open any vault, in any bank, and using perfect timing to guide his henchmen through the heists. As far as a weekly villain goes, Robert Knepper played a formidable foe for “Team Arrow”; he’s smart and has nothing to lose. Even with Sara (Black Canary) on the team now, he still proved to be hard to take down, and if it wasn’t for Felicity taking a bullet for her, Sara may have been put in a grave.
Felicity struggled a bit this week with Sara joining the team. Sara has a lot of science-smarts and can kick some ass as well. Felicity begins to doubt her role on the team and just how much she is needed anymore, and the Clock King “out-hacking” her to decimate the computers in the Arrow Cave does her no favors. In a desperate move to prove herself, Felicity puts herself in the line of fire during the Clock King’s last big heist – and pays for it.
On the Laurel front, she is spiraling further and further down as she deals with her sister’s return with alcohol and drugs. Laurel has been a tough character to swallow this season as she is the most pessimistic character on the show with few redeeming qualities. If she’s not made at “The Hood”, then it’s directed at someone in her family, or even herself. Considering her boyfriend died at the end of season one and all the violence and drama she’s had to ensure, this is probably expected, but a lot of her anger is coming from a very irrational angle. A huge highlight of this episode though was a powerful scene between Laurel and Oliver in which he confronts her about all of her issues and essentially tells her he’s done trying to help her.
The roster of characters on “Arrow” is growing week by week it seems. Usually, this can become very detrimental as we only get forty-or-so minutes each week to cover so many players and sub-plots; but I’ll be damned if it’s just working so well! There are so many characters to root for, my personal favorites being Oliver, Diggle, Felicity, and Detective Lance. However, Sara, Roy, Thea, and Moira all have plenty to do that is important to driving this show forward. Every week I continue to be impressed with the character development and world-building that is achieved in a relatively short amount of time, and enjoy every second of it.
There is, however, the matter of Roy. Our resident “super soldier” has hardly been seen since Oliver agreed to train him, which feels very odd. Obviously he is young, inexperienced, and has anger issues to deal with, but his disappearance does leave the feeling of a bit of a gap. Is he still training with Oliver off screen? How is he dealing with his anger and power? I’m sure these will all take the forefront again soon enough, and I’m happy their aren’t rushing into him becoming Oliver’s sidekick, but this is one character who could use a bit more screen time, if nothing else, just to show the audience what he has been up to.
Finally, the conclusion of this episode was one of the most anticipated reunions since the pilot. Oliver and Slade finally meeting face to face in the present Starling City! The casual way Slade “introduced himself” to Oliver and the look of shock on Oliver’s face was perfect. “Arrow” has always been good at providing us viewers with “Holy Shit!” moments, and this was absolutely one of those moments. I will say this, no other show out there makes the week in between episodes feel longer than “Arrow”.
We will get to see how Oliver and Slade’s first meeting since getting off the island goes in an all-new episode next week!