Man, I’m glad Arrow has a “previously on,” because I remembered approximately nothing of the last episode. In my defense, I’ve spent that time watching Bloodline and Daredevil, and also it’s apparently cool to just go on hiatus for no reason. Gotham just took six weeks off, Arrow‘s been gone for three or four, there hasn’t been a new Simpsons in about a month, SNL will take month-long breaks for no reason…look, when John Oliver took a week off, it was lame, but he had a good reason: he was in Russia interviewing Edward Snowden. That’s a pretty good reason! But now it seems like shows will just say “Eh, fuck it, the ratings are good enough that we’re not going to lose any significant number of viewers.”
Anyway, on to “Broken Arrow,” which I actually liked a lot, my complaints above notwithstanding. Arrow‘s third season has, if nothing else, done a great job at showing the consequences of Oliver’s vigilante lifestyle. There were actual, tangible losses, excluding one fake-out, and I found myself admiring the show for so successfully painting Oliver into a corner. It really looks like the only way out of this is to accept Ra’s al Ghul’s offer, which I would have done about four episodes and ten deaths ago. (Oliver says he won’t let anyone die for him, but what he means is he won’t let anyone he knows die for him.)
Oh, and I guess this was a Flash crossover? Kind of? I haven’t been keeping track of The Flash, which is my own misfortune, but I deduced pretty quickly that Jake Simmons, aka Deathbolt (played creepily by Doug Jones) is a meta-human from Central City. He makes his presence known right away, by zapping two bank guards with lasers from his eyes. When the cat (the Arrow) is away, the mice (people with laser eyes) will play.
Oliver can’t go after Deathbolt himself, because the Arrow, aka Roy Harper, is supposed to be behind bars. He has no choice but to team up with Ray, who’s far more excited about the prospect than is Oliver. (“It’s a team-up! High five!” he crows. Yeah, he is not the Arrow kind of vigilante.) Ray goes to confront Deathbolt, and promptly gets his ass kicked, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is his over-reliance on his tech. “If you rely on the suit more than you rely on yourself,” Oliver cautions him, “you’re going to get killed.” The second reason would be the suit itself: super suits are always getting fucked up. Look at Iron Man at the end of ANY battle. It doesn’t matter how many thrusters and repulsors and missiles you outfit yourself with, if you try to catch a purse snatcher while wearing a super suit, you’re coming home with several hundred thousand dollars worth of repairs to make. If I may, I’d like to make one humble suggestion:
Motherfucking rocket punch.
Moving on. Roy is having a hard go of things in Iron Heights – there’s a lot of people inside who would love to take out the Arrow. He manages to fend off four of them – while in handcuffs! – but he knows he won’t be lucky forever. Quentin Lance knows too, as he tells Oliver: “When – not if – he gets a shank in the back, that body will be on you.” (Quentin also searches Thea’s loft, and with the amount of bullshit he’s put the Queens through the last few seasons, Thea has the basis for an ironclad harassment suit. Season four idea. You can have that one, Greg Berlanti.)
In “Broken Arrow”‘s best sequence, Ray goes to take down Deathbolt after he takes Felicity prisoner. Knowing he doesn’t have Oliver’s superior instincts, and Oliver doesn’t know how to use the suit, Ray instead comes up with the idea of letting Oliver control the suit via a neural transmitter (billionaires always be having neural transmitters). It’s an intense, well-edited sequence, that comes to a halt too soon once the transmitter gets busted. Ray has to step up and subdue Deathbolt himself, which he does. Good thing too, because his suit sucks.
The end of “Broken Arrow” is where Arrow really steps its game up. Honestly it moved this review up from four stars to four and a half. Roy gets stabbed in prison and Quentin tells Oliver and Thea that he’s dead. What a bold move, I thought, right before Roy shows up, alive. He has to leave town, and as he takes off in a kick-ass Dodge Charger, you can see on Ray’s face that he’s in over his head, and he might not be ready for the toll that vigilante life will take on him and his loved ones. (I’d bet good money that Roy will show up in Central City soon; I can’t see the CW saying goodbye to Colton Haynes just yet.)
So, I didn’t love the fake-out (it felt like Arrow undermining its own sense of consequences), but the ending made up for it. Ra’s al Ghul shows up in Thea’s loft, with the aim of giving Oliver some more motivation to take him up on his offer. He and Thea fight, and Thea holds her own, but Ra’s is doing that bad guy thing where he just holds his forearms behind his back and ducks all of Thea’s attacks, until he slams her through a glass table. Then stabs her. With a huge sword that goes all the way through her. It’s a great ending, as Thea appears to be actually dead (which is different than Arrow dead). We’ll see how this plays out next week (or maybe a month from now – I’M STILL MAD), but it’s looking more and more like Oliver has to take the deal.
A Few Thoughts
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Quentin tells Oliver: “No one close to you has died.” Fucking what? What about Sara, Moira, Shado, and Tommy?
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“How many abandoned warehouses do you think are in this city? I’m genuinely asking.”
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Anybody else notice that the prisoners used actual knives and not shivs? How loose are the contraband rules at Iron Heights?
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Forgive the hyperbole, but if Oliver becomes the next Ra’s al Ghul, it would be one of the ballsiest storytelling decisions in recent TV history
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