Arrow S03E06 – Review

For a show like Arrow, dicey moral distinctions are part of its bread-and-butter, the source of most of its dramatic tension and the closest it comes to escaping its strictures as a teen soap. The first season had a particularly shaky handle on right and wrong, what with Ollie killing or almost killing every crooked CEO he came across, but nowadays, he and his team are on sufficiently secure high ground that you don’t often question their position on a given dilemma.

This episode disturbs that credibility to a certain extent because the characters can’t seem to navigate what seems to us a fairly clear-cut issue. After Felicity pieces together enough evidence to make the theory that Roy killed Sara seem probable, the question of what to do with Roy sends the rest of the team into a spiral. Dinah is angered by the suggestion that being under the influence of Mirakuru would absolve Roy of the crime; Diggle is right there with her; and although Ollie’s reaction is more ambiguous, he doesn’t seem prepared to let the incident go either. Even Roy feels he should turn himself in (forgetting that no one, especially Quentin, knows about Sara’s murder yet).

What’s startling is how no one manages to bring up an argument in Roy’s defense, even though he’s got an almost foolproof one. Felicity is right to point out how much is unknown about Mirakuru, but one thing we do know is that it drives people insane. And this is a substance Roy was involuntarily injected with under circumstances that can only be described as a kidnap. Surely, if Ollie saw this as good enough reason to look past Roy’s Mirakuru-induced killing of a cop last season, this should give Roy a pass on killing Sara, too.

The fact that no one else sees it that way is the very definition of personal bias, which again, no one seems to realize. All this blindness seems to be forced, a way for Oleson-Shimizu to make the parallel they want to former vigilante Ted Grant and his ex-protégé-turned-serial murderer, Isaac Stanzler. But even these efforts only go so far to make the Ted-Isaac relationship a model for Ollie-Roy. In fact, the writing is downright clumsy in the way both Ted and Isaac try to turn Ollie and Roy into their counterparts. Keeping in mind that they have no idea who Roy is and what he’s done, Isaac tells Roy not to trust Ollie, while Ted advises Ollie to cut off Roy before it’s too late.

Amazingly enough, it’s Roy who has the right response, telling Isaac simply, “I’m not you.” Isaac was a kid on the wrong path who took a life into his own hands of his own accord. Roy started his life on the show with heroic aspirations, and his only crime was to be forcefully taken and experimented on by Sebastian Blood. Ollie may have a point saying Ted’s mistake was to lose faith in his apprentice, but that doesn’t acknowledge that Roy is no Isaac.

All this grief hardly matters anyway because [Spoiler alert!] Roy didn’t actually kill Sara. Using the magic of meditation, a technique acquired during this episode’s unmemorable Hong Kong flashback, Ollie helps Roy realize it’s the dead cop, not Sara, he’s remembering. And that’s when we run into real trouble, as Ollie tries to convince Roy that killing the cop is forgivable because he was under Mirakuru, while this whole time everyone, including Ollie, has suggested Roy’s guilt for doing the exact same thing to Sara. Again, it’s Roy who sees the contradiction in these two conclusions, and his subsequent upset might all have been avoided had Ollie simply been consistent in Roy’s defense. All Ollie’s different standards for Sara and an unknown cop tells us and Roy is that Ollie’s faith in Roy only goes so far.

-Minhquan Nguyen