It’s Anarky in Star City, as a new mayoral hopeful emerges, and Laurel does some digging.
[dropcap size=small]I[/dropcap]t’s easy to tell that the Arrow producers know where they went wrong with season three. Felicity spent the whole season whining, Laurel had literally nothing to do, Ollie was just a douche, and there weren’t enough new characters to keep it interesting.
Already this season, we’ve seen Felicity cracking jokes again (even when she’s firing people), Laurel take on a pretty risky mission, Ollie smile more than he did in the first three seasons combined, and in this episode, a sh*t ton of new comic book characters.
Let’s start with Mr. Terrific. Felicity, now CEO of Palmer Tech., returns and is presented with a list of people she has to fire for the company to stay afloat. Felicity meets Curtis Holt, who claims that his algorithm determined whose names made the list, but then immediately backtracks when she actually starts firing people.
But Felicity doesn’t want to fire people. She looks for an alternative, and when she and Holt discover that his name is on the list, he helps her find one. Felicity re-hires everyone, and boldly states that she and Holt are developing a new technology that will save the company. It’s quite the bluff, she’s not developing anything, but she’s hoping for something terrific from (in comic book land) the third-smartest person on the planet.
Another newcomer this week is Jessica Danforth, supposedly the titular ‘candidate’, but we’ll get to that. Danforth was a friend of Moira Queen’s (seriously, where has she been this whole time?), and she and her daughter have lunch with Ollie and Thea to catch up. But not to catch up. Danforth announces her intention to run for mayor, because it went really well for Moira. And Sebastian Blood. And that other one.
She thinks she can give the citizens of Star hope where the Green Arrow can’t – as someone who is visibly acting against all the supervillains that end up there. This gives Ollie an idea. Again, we’ll get to that.
Danforth calls a press conference so she can formally enter the mayoral race (unopposed), but surely she knows that something always goes wrong at Star City press conferences. There’s an unmanned gun shooting at everyone, and while Thea investigates, Ollie throws the mystery culprit down some stairs, but he runs into some traffic and gets away when Ollie is hit by a truck.
Fortunately for Ollie, Felicity is rich now, so he just goes ahead and buys the truck with her money. Felicity deduces a couple of things here.. First, that she and Diggle need codenames (easy – Oracle and Magneto, right?), and second, after working out that their mystery man is also a psychopath, slicing off bits of his own fingers and replacing them with other people’s to avoid being detected by fingerprints, she finds a name: Lonnie Machin. And Anarky ensues.
Machin returns to Damien Darhk without Danforth, and Darhk isn’t happy. Wanting to rid Star City of any kind of leader so he has it all to himself, Darhk offers Machin another chance to take out Danforth, but it’s his last chance. HIVE doesn’t believe in third chances.
So Machin kidnaps Danforth’s daughter. It’s a waste of his second chance, as Darhk doesn’t care for his tactlessness, but Machin continues his plan anyway. He takes her to his secret torture chamber, where he has a weapon for every occasion, but he is rudely interrupted by Ollie and Thea.
Machin temporarily stuns Thea with his electric stick (because he has one of those), and he takes on the Green Arrow with relative ease. Only when Thea returns to the fray in full lazarus pit mode is Machin taken down, or should I say – lit up. Machin sets alight, and Ollie puts him out (lucky that pipe was there) because he’s a different guy now.
Machin is left for dead while Danforth is reunited with her daughter. Machin’s subplot ends in the back of an ambulance, where two doctors are dead on the floor, and the letter ‘A’ has been sprayed on the wall. Darhk and Anarky will make for two interesting antagonists this year. One more powerful, but the other willing to go further. One believes his work is necessary, the other just thrives on chaos.
Oh right, the candidate. Yeah, Ollie is the candidate. Ollie decides to run for mayor following Danforth’s Green Arrow speech. He’ll have to run against Danforth, who won’t step down because she’s crazy. If Danforth knew Moira, she probably knows Merlyn, she might even have been in on his plan in season one. She’s more than meets than eye, and I think she could be a serious threat to Ollie in more ways than one this season.
Let’s talk about Laurel. It’s easy to forget that Laurel wasn’t involved in the Thea-lazarus pit storyline of last season, but then, she wasn’t really involved in anything last season. She first hears about the pit and its powers of rebirth in this episode, and so she organises a girl’s trip to the ‘spa’. And by girls, I mean her, Thea and her sister’s corpse. And by spa, I mean Nanda Parbat. She digs up her sister in an entirely public graveyard, and off they go.
I’m still not comfortable with Sara coming back, and here’s why. We’re not going to see Laurel surpass her sister now. Black Canary is on par with Ollie in the comics, but we won’t see that because Laurel will never escape her sister’s shadow. Sara did the Canary thing first, and has been at it longer, which means Laurel will remain a side character as long as Sara lives.
I like Sara as much as the next guy, but she’s the reason fans aren’t getting behind Laurel (that and some poor writing). Remember, Green Arrow/Black Canary are a thing. We’re talking about the woman whose picture Ollie carried around with him for five years, but now there’s barely a line of dialogue between them because fans preferred Felicity. Good work, fans. You ruined Black Canary.
So, to the flashbacks, where another comic book character pops up on the island. Ollie is instructed with making the soldiers there trust him, and when he kills a guy (he’s a different person now) and blames it on a bomb, he is taken to Baron Blitzkrieg.
Now, they’re only using Blitzkrieg as a name here. He won’t have any of the superhuman strength he uses to fight Superman/Wonder Woman in the comics. Blitzkrieg will be the ‘big bad’ of the flashbacks, and he starts by recruiting Ollie, and shaving off his luscious locks. So evil.
Arrow returns to The CW next Wednesday.
