Arrow dove headfirst into mythology with “The Magician,” and it was pretty awesome to see. Actually, I’m not going to gild the lily: this was a great fucking episode. Sara’s death is having ramifications far more dire than I thought it would, and I love that in season three this show can still surprise me.
“The Magician” dealt primarily – well, pretty much exclusively – with two parts of Arrow‘s universe: the League of Assassins, and Oliver’s time spent in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong flashbacks are seriously cool, and the fact that he had this continental sojourn before going back to the island is absolutely worthy of a superhero’s origin story. Tonight sees him under assignment from Amanda Waller – as a “gun she can point at problems,” as Oliver puts it – and his orders are to take out a terrorist named Adam Katzwith, who as it turns out was Edward Fyers’ handler. Fyers was under orders from Waller herself to shoot down Ferris Air flight 637 (nice nod to Carol Ferris, aka Star Sapphire), but Oliver foiled him. I love that this is all tying in so nicely. I swear, if any other show tried this my eyes would roll out of my skull, but Arrow firmly, unabashedly embraces its comic book identity, and in doing so tells one of the most confident serialized stories on TV right now.
But the meat of “The Magician” concerns Sara’s death. Nyssa al Ghul comes to town (which we saw last week) and is firmly convinced that Malcolm Merlyn, aka the Magician, was responsible for Sara’s death. The only people who know the truth are the viewers, Malcolm, and Thea (who somewhat hilariously says that Oliver is “totally in the dark”), and to his credit Malcolm never betrays Thea by saying that the two of them were in Corto Maltese at the time of Sara’s death.
There are a lot of conflicting emotions here – Oliver wants to stick to his no-killing code, while Laurel and Nyssa want to see Malcolm dead – and it’s a testament to Arrow‘s storytelling (and John Behring’s direction) that the emotional beats are as captivating as the fight scenes. (Speaking of which, there is an amazingly well-done fight scene between Oliver, Nyssa, and Malcolm; this isn’t Behring’s first Arrow episode, and it shows.)
What “The Magician” did so capably was set up the Big Bad and the central conflict of season three. While Sara’s death, at first blush, might have seemed like an easy way to get rid of a character, what it really did was put Oliver in the crosshairs of the League of Assassins, who regard his refusal to kill Malcolm as a declaration of war. Nyssa goes to visit her father Ra’s al Ghul (Matthew Nable) in the episode’s closing scene, and even though he kinda looks like Martin Freeman with a goatee, he projects enough menace that it’s easy to see why his own daughter calls him “the demon.”
And that, in a nutshell, is what I liked so much about “The Magician” – it didn’t feel like an episode, it felt like an issue, part of a larger arc like you’d see in a run of comic books. Arrow isn’t tongue-in-cheek, nor does it take itself overly seriously (as Christopher Nolan’s Batman films were occasionally guilty of doing); it hits the right balance between the realistic and the unbelievable,and episodes like this are just proof that there is no show around right now that does it better.
A Few Thoughts
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Malcolm’s smoke bomb exit was very theatrical. I loved it
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Love the dynamic between Oliver and Maseo, even if Maseo’s death is inevitable, seeing as his wife will eventually become Katana
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Matthew Nable didn’t get much screentime tonight, but I’m looking forward to seeing more of him. He’s in a thankless job, though; the last guy to play Ra’s was Liam goddamn Neeson
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