Arrow S03E01 – Review

Arrow has worked pretty hard to reach a point where a stable audience can get excited for its third season premiere, almost as hard as the characters on the show have worked to finally start thinking about their personal lives. In the episode’s open, we see Team Arrow has forged into an effective unit, each member breezily playing their role to send Starling City’s crime rate plummeting. As Diggle says, now’s the time to focus on those other crucial parts of life: love, work, family, etc.

And for the first half of the episode, it looks like this can really happen, that Starling City can finally get its act together so our heroes can have the happiness they’ve postponed. Detective Lance is now Captain Lance, who gets right down to breaking up the anti-vigilante force; Dinah’s steadily finishing off the criminals Team Arrow catches; Diggle and Lyla bliss out on clichéd pregnancy troubles; and Ollie and Felicity explore this Olicity thing they keep hearing so much about. Everything’s looking up for everybody, a nice contrast to the last two year’s dark and gritty grind—until a rocket comes flying into the Italian restaurant where Olicity are having dinner to snap us back to the usual state of grimness.

The tragedy’s not just that Ollie retreats from the optimistic outlook he has at the top of the episode, but that he’s losing key members of his support group right and left. By the episode’s close, his allies are cut in half,* either going off active-duty status, like Lance and Diggle, or [Spoiler alert!] winking out altogether, like Sara. Her apparent death is cripplingly anticlimactic, which is probably why it’s reserved until seconds before the episode reaches the finish line. The cheap melodrama (several sudden arrows in the chest from an unknown source, bleeding out and blank-eyed in Dinah’s arms, many a distressed “No—no—no!!“) barely works as a shocking cliffhanger; Arrow will have to get a lot of mileage from it if it wants to convince us this wasn’t done just to clear the path for a noticeably blonder Dinah.

Another long-term consequence of the rocket attack is it fuels Ray Palmer’s argument that the city is still “dying,” and only his Steve Jobs-like charisma can save it—if he wins his bid for Queen Consolidated, of course. This positions Ray as Team Arrow’s frenemy for the near future, a role Brandon Routh is accustomed to playing. For this show, however, Routh practically sweats to break through his pretty-boy woodenness, and he’s rewarded by mostly passing as a young, hip, entreprenerd,** shedding BTWs left and right, and gesturing sarcastically as he riffs on Felicity’s salesmanship.***

The battle with the new Count Vertigo is, in the grand scheme of things, of no moment. Despite slipping past Ollie’s usual vigilance, Werner Zytle exists solely to undermine our hero’s confidence and is no more or less difficult to defeat than the usual crazed mafia lord on Arrow. Peter Stomare gives an outsized, borderline outrageous, performance and employs an accent not born of this Earth, but that just makes him fit in with the rest of Arrow‘s occasionally too colorful villains (who are still a step above the sociopathic clowns of Gotham).

As for our Ollie flashbacks, now transplanted to Hong Kong (though he’s doomed to return to the Island before all this is over), we know too little about his overarching purpose there to decide if it’s a good move or not. If nothing else, it’s a chance to flesh out the svelte Waller and her mission—besides blowing up whole populations, of course. I can’t imagine the flashback plots can get more implausible within a civilized area than a supposedly remote island, though we’ll be lacking Manu Bennett’s magnetic presence.

– Minhquan Nguyen