‘You have failed this omelette.’
[dropcap size=small]I[/dropcap] will never stop watching Arrow. Against all odds, the show delivered two near perfect seasons of TV (we’re still not talking about season three), but when lines like ‘Felicity Smoak, you have failed this omelette,’ are a thing, it can be easy to forget that.
Season four kicks off with Ollie and Felicity a long way from Star City (renamed for Ray Palmer, who is dead now. I mean, really, he’s totally dead. Honest) and they’re happy and you’re happy for them but at the same time you’re kind of just waiting for things to go to sh*t for them. Meanwhile, Laurel/Black Canary, Thea/Speedy and Diggle/Magneto, are trying to kid themselves into thinking they’re fine on their own.
Omelettes aside, it’s so far so good. Felicity is smiling again, Laurel has grown into something like a Black Canary, and Ollie catches a champagne bottle while his friends Mr. Nobody and Mrs. Extra look on in admiration.
So Ollie is going to propose to Felicity, except he isn’t because you just know things are about to go to sh*t. That’s when Laurel and Thea show up and ruin his day and we love it. They tell Ollie all about the ‘Ghosts’ attacking Star, and Ollie agrees to help because Felicity says so.
And who’s leading the Ghosts? It’s Damien Darhk, who introduces himself by interrupting a meeting between all of the Star City leaders, where he effortlessly tells them that he’s going to kill them all.
Sure enough, he kills them all, except Lance, who is rescued by his daughter in one of her more realistic fight scenes. Remember last season when Laurel trained for, like, one episode and then took on the entirety of the League and won? This time she’s in some trouble, but she overcomes it. She’s got a hell of a lot more to overcome if she is to surpass her sister as everyone’s favourite Canary. Sara, by the way, was the Canary. Laurel is the only Black Canary. Just so we’re clear.
Anyway, Ollie comes back, and Digneto isn’t happy about it, but Lyla convinces him that he should work with Ollie, because she was totally OK with being kidnapped. Felicity leaves him no choice when she learns of Darhk’s plans to blow up Star’s brand new train line, and Ollie sets about telling everyone what to do. They sort of go along with it (all except Magdiggle) and Felicity sits at her computer like she never left it.
Which she didn’t. Because while Ollie was busy planning their new life together, she was still working with the team from her computer, all behind Ollie’s back. There’s some tension, but to the show’s credit, it’s quickly quashed. Arrow needs to focus on its heroes and villains right now, not the relationship melodrama that turned season three into a soap opera.
Felicity uses GPS to track the Ghosts to an abandoned warehouse (where else?), and the team watches as Darhk makes an example of one unfortunate Ghost by literally draining the life out of him with his hand. But he’s not a metahuman. Ollie has ‘seen things’.
Team Arrow launches an assault on Darhk and his Ghosts, and Thea gets a little too into it, endlessly beating on one dude until the police show up. This is obviously a plot point to keep an eye on this season. We never truly saw the effects the lazarus pit had on Thea after her rebirth; it looks like we might be about to. Ollie later gives her one of his classic brother speeches, but she’s not interested.
With one option left, Ollie leaves Laurel and Thea on crowd control duty as he hijacks Darhk’s train and finds him immediately. Darhk clearly isn’t one to lie low and let someone else do the job for him, and that’s probably because he’s unbeatable. He stops Ollie’s arrows in mid-air (still not a metahuman), and easily fends him off in hand-to-hand combat. Side note: it’s great to see Arrow doing what it does best here; dudes beating each other up.
Diggle arrives in the nick of time to put a dart in Darhk’s back, but instead of defeating him, it only distracts him long enough for Ollie to get to his feet. Outnumbered, Darhk disappears vampire-like into the night, and Ollie and Diggle blow up the train to stop it blowing up some other stuff because logic.
So Ollie will stick around to save his city from Darhk (and because Felicity says so), and he takes over the airwaves, pronouncing himself the Green Arrow (as everyone believes The Arrow to be dead) to every TV station in the city by way of a thoroughly underwhelming and thrown-together speech.
It’s going to be difficult to save the city this time, because Captain Lance is working with Darhk. Perhaps Darhk blackmailed Lance into joining his cause, or maybe Lance is sick of trying to run a city full of supervillains so he’s decided to destroy it all; either way, Ollie’s in trouble, and so, eventually, is Lance, who surely won’t stick around when he realises the extent of Darhk’s plans.
This leads me to the final scene. Ollie stands over a grave, accompanied briefly by Barry Allen, where he swears vengeance on the body in the ground’s killer. He doesn’t mention Darhk. He doesn’t mention anyone. Any theory is valid as to whose grave that is, and who put them there.
A general rule with Arrow is to expect the unexpected. This is a show that legit made John Barrowman Ra’s al Ghul. Anything can happen, but someone is going to die. For real this time.
Also flashbacks happened. Ollie is back on the island. Bye.
Arrow returns to The CW next Wednesday night.
