Arrow, Season 5, Episode 3: A Matter of Trust
It is a cruel, cruel bait and switch for them to open the recap with teases to the Flash episode that established that Flashpoint might have changed a few things and caused some other changes beyond the gender of John Diggle's child... and then to show that Diggle's new cellmate is a suddenly-alive Deadshot, who brushes off his survival with "eh, never found the body." And apparently it's not a Flashpoint-assisted revival of a character who's death is all but caused by WB muscling in on DC properties... but just a guilt-induced hallucination.
Mind you, Deadshot playing cards is, in retrospect, a sign that it's all in Diggle's head how he associates the guilt he's having with both Deadshot and the fact that he killed Andy. But still, it's a very cruel moment to be for all the wrong reasons when I realized that Deadshot isn't actually in the cell. Unless he showed up, played some cards to dick around with Diggle, and when Diggle wasn't looking he snuck away while giggling.
That said, Diggle's sub-plot is a lot better here than the previous one, where he confronts the fact that he's still feeling guilt over killing his brother, HIVE or not. The random decision to serve time for a crime he didn't commit was a dumb move, though, that's for sure.
Oh well. The rest of the episode is pretty standard. We get more development on the Neo Team Arrow, as the main lesson of this episode is trust and accountability (which kinda ties with the Diggle thing up above). The Thea B-plot has her deal with one Susan Williams, who's making all sorts of headlines painting Oliver as this fool who doesn't even know what's going on in his administration. Thea's attempts to fix things makes it worse, and she is prepared to resign. But at the end of the episode Oliver walks up and vindicates both Thea and Quentin, noting that Oliver trusts his administration but the blame stops at him. Oh, and apparently the D.A. or something in Oliver's administration is one Adrian Chase, a.k.a. Vigilante. We don't see any vigilantism from the Vigilante here, but he's just portrayed as a good honest man wanting to do what's right and whatnot.
One of the biggest weakness is dropping Wild Dog, Starling and Ragman all at once on our lap without developing them enough. Ragman got an origin story and an emotional moment last week, and Starling was a one-off villain, but we're still kind of eeeh about their personalities. Wild Dog gets the biggest brunt of screentime in both this and the previous episode as the brash, young foil to Oliver's stern leadership, dragging the impressionable Starling off with him to bust some crimes. Yes, Oliver trusting Wild Dog's call might've avoided this whole mess, but so would Wild Dog actually listening to orders. Both sides apologize to each other after a period of conflict, which I hope won't be happening every episode. Let one of the other dudes have the conflict with Ollie.
Derek Sampson, the villain of the week, is just a brand-new character created for the show, apparently to give a wrestler that fought Stephen Amell a role as an antagonist. He's going around selling Stardust, a super-awesome drug that's Vertigo tenfold, and Wild Dog's short-sighted pursuit turned him into a metahuman taht can't feel pain, as well as causing him to be able to dodge Adrian Chase's legal clutches. He's not that much of a threat, to be honest, other than the initial surprise on Oliver, and Oliver gets a pretty cool moment of rappelling him up and punching him to the ground, as well as noting how not being able to feel pain doesn't mean he doesn't need those tendons and muscles.
And as cool as it is to have Neo Team Arrow in action (including Ragman ragging people with magic rag tendrils) the absolute coolest thing is Curtis Holt, dressed in his Mister Terrific getup. We get a brief name-drop to the first Mister Terrific, a wrestler in this continuity, but the talk about the Fair Play motto gets brought up. And he actually wears that stupid, goofy-ass T-shaped mask that's pasted onto his face! Oh my god, it's the one thing that I thought the show wouldn't be able to adapt properly, but they did! And it looks so fucking good, as much as a black T pasted onto someone's face can look good.
Speaking about all the trust that Wild Dog and Oliver have with each other, Felicity and Curtis talk about how Ragman hails from Havenrock (with some glorious awkwardness from Curtis), and at the end of this episode Felicity reveals her complicity in Havenrock's destruction to Ragman. It's nice that it's not going to be dragged out for the whole season like the past four Arrow seasons where secrets are stretched for what they're worth, and I hope this gets to become something interesting.
The Bratva flashback plot shows how Oliver needs to trust the Bratva brotherhood, allowing the Bratva members to get close to Oliver's unprotected back and trust them to carve just enough to make a tattoo, and apparently Anatoli shows that the people that the Bratva killed in the initiation are actually murderers that are saved by association to their mutual enemy, Constantine Kovar. Though the hilariously wide smile on that old lady's face when Anatoli shows her a bullet-ridden boy while going "I'm here to talk about your boy" is such a wack scene until it's revealed that the dead Bratva initiate was the murderer of her boy.
So yeah. The lack of Prometheus and Tobias Church means that this episode felt more filler-y. Stardust is throwaway, and the surprise appearance of Deadshot is a bait-and-switch. It's more to build up the connection between our heroes, which, considering it's starring a brand new cast, is breathing room that the show definitely needed. Maybe it could do more work with, say, cutting out some of the pointless plot arcs like the Thea/Mayor Oliver one. It's a decent episode, that's for sure.
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- Adrian Chase is the secret identity of the Vigilante, the second superhero to use that name. The first is a cowboy, whereas Adrian Chase is more of a street-level vigilante. More on him when we actually meet him in a suit.
- Terris Sloane is the first, Golden Age era Mr. Terrific, whereas Michael Holt took over the mantle from him in the modern day. Curtis's costume here nails the comic-book version of Michael Holt quite awesomely, with the Fair Play jacket and the silly-but-still-awesome T pasted to his face.
- There's a fair amount of meta humour here, where Oliver seems to genuinely like Wild Dog's hockey mask, a reference to Oliver's actor Stephen Amell playing the hockey mask wearing Casey Jones in TMNT 2 earlier this year. Derek Sampson's actor is played by a wrestler whose stage name was 'Stardust', which is referenced in the name of the drug he's selling.
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