Arrow, Season 4, Episode 22: Lost in the Flood
Arrow spent its penultimate episode in a bit of a sidequest to wrap all random loose ends up before the big finale, which is a far better thing to do in a penultimate episode than fighting a random new filler villain like what they did over in Flash. The last episode was really great, and it's a bit hard to come off the coattails of that particularly awesome episode, and this episode isn't quite as good as that, thanks to the haphazard focus. But hey, it's a pretty decent entry, and certainly sets things up for a big confrontation.
The focus in this episode is split into two, the Smoak household and Green Arrow and Spartan going off to deal with the Ark Dome thing. Of the two, well... the whole Smoak drama really is annoying, is it? Felicity and Calculator passive-aggressively finding similarities with each other while Felicity hates Calculator on principle is fun, having Curtis Holt make a welcome return and geek out all over Calculator and just be a preciously hilarious fellow is a great improvement. But having Donna come in and just kind of be prissy and angry about how Felicity is keeping secrets and everything... when she herself has been a gigantic hypocrite about keeping the secret how she left Noah instead of the other way around? Wow, Donna, my respect for you just plummeted really hard. You somehow managed to be a bigger hypocrite than Oliver or Laurel ever was throughout all four seasons, and with that holier-than-thou attitude she showed Quentin last episode, and her utterly misguided attempts to inject this family drama in a time where, oh, I don't know, Felicity, Noah and Curtis are trying to stop nuclear Armageddon? Yeah, bugger off.
And really, we could've had some really great Felicity drama by playing off the fact that she just redirected a nuke to blow up Havenrock. But, nah, have some cringeworthy family drama. Who the fuck cares which Felicity parent left who? Like, seriously.
Other than that, though, it's a pretty decent episode. Sure, having Team Felicity spend the entirety of it just typing on keyboards fighting against the return of another defeated supervillain -- Cooper "Brother Eye" Sheldon -- is kind of boring, but it's still cool to bring out another old supervillain. I mean, Cooper was defeated by Felicity alone. Her with help? Yeah, I never bought it that Cooper stood a chance. Of course there's the random bit of somehow hacking being able to create electrical explosions, but hey, what do I know about hacking.
Darhk makes the classic villain mistake of showing off his full power, deflecting bullets and arrows and turning them into dust, and then leaving Green Arrow and Spartan alive to suffer. Yeah, Oliver hasn't even used his totally-plot-device white magic power against you yet, Darhk. That's obviously how Oliver's going to beat you. Reeeeally could've given us a way or two to make this less blatantly obvious.
Oliver and Diggle ends up tracking HIVE's movements down to the Tevat Noah dome, in which Malcolm has brainwashed Thea with drugs, and Anarky is just a wildcard threatening to fuck everything up. It really feels like how you should go and fight the end-game boss, but decide to sneak off and complete this random side-dungeon first. It's a cool raid with a lot of great fight scenes between Oliver and Thea, with the nicely surreal setting of Tevat Noah giving us a very atmospheric scene... and is a filler disguised with a great presentation. I really doubt we needed that bit of a filler with a mind-controlled Thea, but hey. There was a bit with a random dude saying about how he volunteered for Tevat Noah because Darhk gave him hope which felt way too ham-handed, but there's that... one of the biggest themes of this season before the Olicity plot tumour replaced it was whether Green Arrow and/or Oliver Queen can be a symbol of hope, and it seems like it's setting it up for the finale, if nothing else.
Granted, Mr. Randomdude kind of misses the point about how Darhk gave him hope... BY NUKING THE WORLD. Fucking hell, if you're so worried about crime, move the fuck away to, like, Ivy Town or Coast City or Metropolis or some shit. I really hope you get crushed by falling rubble, you selfish moron.
Anarky ends up dealing the biggest blow to Darhk, not only being directly responsible for killing Ruve Adams-Darhk, but also blowing up Tevat Noah and collapsing the Glades... again. Of course, Oliver's team manages to save Darhk's daughter, but Ruve's dead. It's a bit of a sudden yet well-deserved death for one of the more underrated but no less impressive villains of this season. There really wasn't much of a dramatic sensibility in having Anarky be the one to end Ruve's life, but, y'know, the spirit of the character is chaos and anarchy, and indeed he does have beef with Damien Darhk. I have a lot of issues for the utter disregard of the source material, but I cannot deny that this incarnation of Anarky is really fun, especially when he breaks out that staff and starts to kick ass.
And with Team Felicity wrenching control of Shadowspire from Cooper, and Darhk finding confirmation that his wife is dead and his daughter's whereabouts are unknown... the dude's finally snapped. All his best-laid plans, all the gloating and the newfound Sith powers, and he couldn't stop the wild factor that is Anarky, and, well, he's just ready to launch nukes all over the place and let the world burn. Which... was honestly already his plan from the get-go, except now he wants to murder everyone instead of keeping to the spirit of the Genesis plan. Which... okay? It's not the worst character development out there. Does make Darhk feel a fair bit weaker as a villain, though.
Oh, and the flashbacks are still dragging things out. Taiana is corrupted by the scary demon totem, Reiter catches up, but nothing happens so Oliver's confrontation with Baron Reiter can happen next episode. Man, even compared to the already lackluster flashback sequences for the first three episodes, nothing really happened in this season's other than Constantine's short cameo, yeah?
Overall, there are a lot of things in this episode that felt like padding or didn't work out for me. Darhk's inaction, the flashbacks, Thea-gets-brainwashed-again-but-it's-like-for-five-minutes and the poor focus taken with the Smoak family drama. That said, though, out of the CW shows this wek I think this is the most coherent and enjoyable out of the three, even if the punchy-punch isn't quite as fun as Legends of Tomorrow's finale.
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