Arrow S03E05 – Review

It’s not often you get this long an absence from me, but the craziness of life intervened. For the last couple days, it got so bad that I only managed to watch this episode in ten-minute chunks, often having to start back thirty seconds back to remind myself what was going on. Actually, if you’re going to watch any Arrow episode distractedly (read: half-assedly), a Felicity-centric one is a pretty good pick.

The nice thing about episodes that the supporting cast is they’re usually self-contained; you don’t have to refer to something that happened a few episodes (or a whole season) ago to follow along. Seeing Felicity’s past as a Goth hacker with a nervous roommate and douchey boyfriend all in one go makes it a bit too easy to see the direction of the episode. The moment Brother Eye appears to technologically terrorize Starling City, you already know whom he’ll turn out to be and most of what he wants.

If that was the whole focus of the episode, you’d have a much lower opinion of it, even with Felicity getting a rare opportunity to take point and kick ass. The opening montage of Ollie, Roy, Dinah, Ted, Thea, and Merlyn going through their outrageous training regimens, in contrast to Felicity calling it a day after five sit-ups, places Felicity as the most normal person in this show. That position is slowly eroded as events spiral for the rest of the episode. Felicity doesn’t stand a chance in a fistfight, but by the same token, no one else can wrap their heads around a computer super-virus.

But all this is your typical brains-versus-brawn reversal. What makes the episode stand out is another fictional cliché—the drama-ridden mother-daughter relationship—that gets good mileage from Emily Bett Rickards’ convincingly frustrated performance and ()’s surprisingly well-rounded one. Donna Smoak looks like a sorority girl who never grew up; her superpower is recognizing men with money; in any other context, she’d look more at home in Cougar Town than Arrow. But she has an openly nurturing side that even Felicity admits, and her own frustration at having her motherly affection rebuffed makes it clear that the distance between them is due as much to Felicity’s judgmentalness as her shortcomings.

It’s heartwarming to see their love for each other come out under crisis and their reconciliation afterwards, but these things are almost guarantees on TV. Much more compelling is Felicity’s intense outburst when mom’s complaints becomes too much on top of the guilt from past mistakes and stress of her usual work. Characters on Arrow usually only lose their cool in the most extreme circumstances—the city’s under siege, their loved one is/about to be murdered, a nemesis thought dead turns up alive—and thus often seem melodramatic. Felicity’s blowout is far more accessible, and Donna’s quietly hurt reaction grounds the scene further.

Arrow has always been smart about balancing its unavoidably operatic elements with character relationships that at least seem believable. You can handle Quentin scolding Dinah for exacerbating a riot because his worry for her is so clear, just like you can handle Dinah concealing Sara’s death from him because you can see how much she dreads his grief. Ollie may lose his temper over Thea’s decision to use Merlyn’s blood money, but their rueful attachment to each other keeps the conflict from turning into a scene out of Days of Our Lives. Times like these is when you realize how crucial family is to the show, which is why it’s so fitting that Felicity gets a bit of her own to deal with.

– Minhquan Nguyen