Arrow Season 1: The Huntress and a Rival Archer

OK, picking up where my earlier Arrow recaps left off, the first two episodes and then the run from three to five, let’s get into the next batch. This is where I think Arrow Season 1 stops being a show about one man with a list and starts being a show about a whole city and the people tangled up in Oliver’s life. There are five episodes to get through, and one of them is the mid-season finale, so there’s a lot of ground to cover.

Legacies

If you recall from the earlier episodes, Diggle is now fully onboard with Oliver’s crimefighting. He believes that while taking down the people on the list is important, Oliver also has a responsibility to act in the public interest when other criminals are involved. In this case the city is being plagued by a gang of bank robbers. Oliver initially refuses, because he thinks it detracts from his underlying mission to right his family’s wrongs, but then Diggle tricks him into meeting the wife of one of the victims and he relents. I like that. It’s the first time the show admits that the list isn’t the whole job.

That pairing is the thing I keep coming back to. Diggle is the one voice in Oliver’s ear telling him the mission is bigger than a notebook full of names, and the show is smart to let him win this argument early. It gives the series room to breathe between the bigger arcs, and it makes Oliver feel like he’s growing rather than just ticking boxes. I also like that the victims here are ordinary people with ordinary problems, rather than another rich man on the list.

Quickly enlisting the help of Felicity Smoak, his resident IT geek who doesn’t yet know who or what he is, he learns that the robbers actually have a connection to his family after all. Derek Reston used to work for Queen Industries until Oliver’s dad outsourced his job, along with thousands more, to China, and without that income Derek and his family were badly hurt. Choosing a life of crime isn’t something I’d support as a next step to make ends meet, but as this is TV I’m willing to throw him a bone! 🙂

Oliver tries to warn Derek that carrying on will have consequences for him and his family, but Derek basically blows him off and blames him for the hardship his father caused. When Derek rejoins his family you can see he’s been thinking about Oliver’s words, and he tries to convince his children to stop. His son has been touched by greed and refuses to quit. When Oliver learns they’re going to hit another bank he has no choice left, and in his alternate persona he confronts the family, and during that confrontation Derek is shot and ends up dead. Meanwhile Tommy keeps working on persuading Laurel that he’s a changed man by helping her throw a fundraiser for her law firm, and the two of them grow closer.

Muse of Fire

This episode we get another character from the DC Universe, and it’s the Huntress! While on her way to meet Oliver, Moira is almost gunned down by a mysterious assailant who was really going after an associate of the mob boss Frank Bertinelli. Oliver leaves his mother bleeding on the street to chase the shooter, who’s on a motorcycle, and only returns to her side once he’s failed to stop the biker, and then gets her to the hospital. His sister blasts him for haring off on his own, and he doesn’t really disagree, but he knows he has a much larger objective.

Oliver tries to infiltrate Frank’s business to find the attacker, since the shooting near his mother wasn’t the only casualty in Frank’s organization. Bertinelli suspects the Triads are targeting him and confronts China White, who you’ll remember from Honor Thy Father in the very first stretch of episodes, as the leader of the Triad in the city. Oliver meanwhile has a dinner date with Frank’s daughter, Helena, and finds that she’s a damaged soul with demons similar to his own. He also learns that she’s the mysterious assailant attacking Frank’s organization!

Helena wants revenge on her father, who she blames for the murder of her fiancé. Frank and his henchmen thought the fiancé was going to turn state’s evidence on them, but really the evidence was Helena’s. She had become disenchanted with her father’s way of life and was planning to turn them all in. When Helena and Oliver are abducted by Frank’s right-hand man, Nick Salvati, she learns that he was the one who murdered her fiancé, escapes her bonds and kills him. In the commotion Oliver escapes too and fights off the other henchmen, and Helena, watching the way he fights, realizes he’s the Arrow. You might recognise Salvati as Karl Agathon from Battlestar Galactica, and it’s nice to see familiar faces, but in some ways the SciFi community is too small. Having the same actor play so many different roles takes away from the believability of each one for me.

Vendetta

Diggle disagrees with Oliver trying to help Helena get her revenge, because he believes she can’t be trusted. Oliver hopes he can persuade her that her father should be handed to the police for justice rather than just killed. At first he seems to be having some success, helping her take out key players in her father’s business, but a failed couples dinner with Tommy and Laurel sends Helena into a rage. She decides Oliver was manipulating her, goes after the Triad and kills the leader of the group, and that attack leads China White and her men to go after Frank, who they believe contracted the hit.

Oliver arrives in time to save Frank and stop Helena from executing her father, and he gets Frank locked up by the police. What he can’t do is persuade Helena that he’s there to help. She refuses to forgive him and threatens to reveal his identity if he comes after her. In Oliver’s personal life he finds out that Tommy has been cut off by his father and needs a job, so he makes him manager of his club and gives him the task of actually finishing it. Walter also learns a bit more about the secret organization Moira belongs to, and I found myself wanting to see more of that thread.

Year’s End

OK, here’s where it gets really interesting. Do you remember Adam Hunt? He was in one of the first two episodes and he’s the person Oliver started his vendetta with. Well, in conversation with someone, Adam Hunt gets an arrow through his chest, and while Detective Lance realizes right away that this is a copycat and not Oliver, the department as a whole believes it’s him and renews its efforts to capture him. I wasn’t alone in enjoying the episode, and one reviewer on ScreenCrush was equally taken with the mid-season finale even while spotting a few plot holes.

Oliver tracks down the mysterious archer, who we learn is actually Malcolm Merlyn, Tommy’s father and the leader of the secret organization Moira is part of! WOW, he’s a busy guy! Oliver puts up a good fight but he’s beaten quite badly. The archer outshoots and outfights him, and it’s only through luck that Oliver escapes. Malcolm is injured too, but he gets away.

On the island, Oliver learns that it’s actually a prison for dangerous criminals, and that his benefactor Yau Fei is one of the prisoners. Walter is also kidnapped by Malcolm’s men because he’s getting too close to the secrets they’re hiding, and he’s held as leverage to make sure Moira doesn’t interfere with Malcolm’s plans.

Burned

Oliver has been badly hurt in the fight with the mysterious archer, and while he tries to convince everyone he’s fine, he’s lost his edge and seems to fear for his life more than before. Six weeks go by and he hasn’t been out as the Vigilante at all, despite Diggle insisting the city needs him. Diggle points out that having people to live for is more of an edge than having no one.

Laurel manages to get her hands on the phone Oliver gave her father and contacts him in his vigilante persona, begging for help tracking down someone who’s murdering firefighters. Agreeing to help Laurel is the push Oliver needs. He’s bested in his first confrontation with the murderer, but he discovers that it’s Garfield Lynns, a firefighter himself, who was thought to have died in a massive fire several years earlier but survived and blames the rest of his team for not coming in after him.

Garfield confronts the fire chief and threatens everyone, but this time Oliver saves the chief and Garfield takes his own life. Laurel’s father has meanwhile worked out that she was able to contact the Hood, and he plants a bug on her phone so he can monitor her conversations. I’m curious how long Laurel can keep that secret, and whether Oliver’s willingness to lean on the people around him is going to cost them.

Looking at the five together, what stands out to me is how many threads get quietly wound up at once: Moira’s secret group, Walter getting too curious, Tommy and Laurel, the island flashbacks, and Detective Lance closing in. None of them is fully resolved in this stretch, and I think that’s deliberate. It keeps the whole thing feeling like a story that’s heading somewhere rather than a string of cases of the week.

Which of these five episodes was your favourite, and did you see the Malcolm Merlyn reveal coming? Tell me in the comments.