Arrow, Season 5, Episode 9: What We Leave Behind
Man, what a great finale. One of my biggest problems about season five is that Prometheus was never a very compelling villain, with Vigilante and Tobias Church both being a lot more interesting. Prometheus has a fair amount of way to go before he becomes truly memorable, and, well he tries his best this episode. Why Slade Wilson and Malcolm Merlyn are remembered to be so much more relevant villains than, say, Damien Darhk or Ra's Al Ghul is simply because of how personal they are, and Arrow's fifth season seems to want to repeat this formula with Prometheus, but in a suitably darker way so it's not just a copy-paste of Slade from the second season.
It's no secret that the fifth season is very much inspired by Arrow's first season, featuring many references to the first season and it's hard not to realize that this is probably planned out. With the 'five years in hell' tagline, whether it was pre-planned or something they decided upon recently, they intended the fifth season to be a 'it all comes back in a circle' style of story where Oliver's more cold-blooded methods in the first season comes back to bite his ass.
So yeah, the flashback in this episode isn't one to the Bratva plotline, but rather to an event that apparently happened during the first season. We've got Oliver with the List, going off to warn these bastards while Diggle is still inactive in the field and being the ignored voice of reason, and Felicity is still blissfully naive and unaware of what's going on. It's a flashback that is especially relevant, because both plotlines past and present utilize this brand-new character Jason Claybourne. In the past, Oliver warns Claybourne off for selling tuberculosis medicine at insanely inflated prices, and later goes all Hood and murders the fucker when he finds out that Claybourne is the one who unleashed that particular strain of tuberculosis in the first place. Claybourne is the type of bastard who would deserve the death penalty... but we are presented with a more sobering look on Oliver's method as the Hood, and the season-one style 'take down armies of bodyguards' is replicated in the present day with Prometheus, only with presumably random civilian bodies standing in for the bodyguards that Oliver killed when hunting Claybourne.
It's a very well-done homage to the first season, that's for sure, because details right up to Oliver's old maskless Hood costume is recreated, and we even get the old low-budget lair. And at the same time, it is chilling seeing Oliver as this relentless, well, killing machine that wiped out that small army's worth of bodyguards. It's always been a point of contention for me that this character who's supposed to be the Green Arrow is basically being Judge Dredd, and I'm happy to see it finally being called out upon.
Oh, and the main plot in the present day isn't bad either. We've got Prometheus finally gunning for our superheroes in their civilian identities, first going to fight Curtis Holt right as he's trying to defend himself from his husband when Paul starts picking out the lies in Curtis's excuses for superheroing. Paul isn't sure what Curtis is doing. Is he cheating? He's certainly not working on a new merger project or anything since Felicity is confused about it, and the sight of Curtis fighting on par with Prometheus, actually managing to pressure him a bit before being stabbed, is enough for Paul to realize something's different is going on. Curtis eventually comes clean, but not before Paul gives him an ultimatum. Choose being a superhero, or choose him. It's a conflict that we've seen multiple times in the superhero genre, and for Curtis in particular it's portrayed as almost a thrill-seeking addiction, an interesting angle to play off of.
Take note that, well, Prometheus, while able to copy some of Oliver's moves, doesn't quite seem to be the super-powerful invincible equal to Oliver that other previous big bads were, and it's a similar case with Tobias Church earlier this season. Sure, Artemis might be faking it, but credit where credit's due, Curtis did seem to give Prometheus a bit of a fair fight, and even against Oliver Prometheus never quite had the upper hand the way Merlyn, Slade, Ra's or Darhk did. No, Prometheus hurts Oliver in different ways. Far more emotional and personal ways.
The detective procedural seems to imply that Prometheus is the bastard son of Justin Claybourne from the flashbacks, which I flat-out don't buy. That's the assumption we're working on at the moment, though, because as Oliver works through the case, Prometheus seems to have recreated Oliver's massacre of Claybourne's people pretty well.
Prometheus's plans eventually involves kidnapping Felicity's boyfriend, officer Billy Malone. And of course this all happens after an argument between the two, where Felicity wants to protect Billy, while Billy just wants to do his job as a cop. Billy ends up biting off more than he can chew, and he gets kidnapped by Prometheus and used as bait. This ends up causing Adrian Chase to lobby for a shoot-to-kill order, which is granted by Mayor Queen, while the rest of Team Arrow is out for blood.
So out of blood, in fact, that Oliver immediately aims to shoot to kill, and in the huge scruffle between him and Prometheus, shoots someone... dressed as Prometheus, and talks like Prometheus... but is actually Billy Malone. It's a brutal, brutal twist where Oliver, in his rush to, well, save Billy, ends up killing the poor bloke instead. It's a sobering way to get Oliver to realize that, yeah, in his hurry to kill, he has caused Billy's death and if he was still in his season 3/4 'thou shalt not kill' mode, it would take Oliver like two extra seconds and he wouldn't fall for the ruse. Prometheus does manage to prove his point, that Oliver's method is arguably as destructive as Vigilante's or Prometheus's.
To the show's credit, Oliver's shell-shocked and ashamed admission that he killed Billy to Felicity, and Felicity's brief moment of shock before affirming that, no, she's not going to hate Oliver for this, the team won't be broken up, but they'll be united in their hunt towards that Prometheus bastard, is also well done and easily one of the scenes that tugged at the heartstrings the most.
Billy isn't a proper character, not really -- he's more of a plot device the way that Thea's two evil boyfriends in seasons three and four were -- so his death didn't make me go all 'dang it, Billy was my favourite character!' and I couldn't care less if in this episode he died from a piano falling from the sky. But the fact that Prometheus made Oliver kill a man, who also deliciously happens to be Felicity's boyfriend, now that's an effective way for drama.
Oh, and I almost forgot -- Artemis makes her betrayal clear. It's a bit of an anticlimax, to be honest, and the impact was sort of lost in all the much stronger drama in the second act, but it's another in a series of things that doesn't quite go right in Oliver's favour. Oliver's first confrontation with Prometheus ends up with Wild Dog's, well, wild-dogging finally paying off as he's about to rescue Oliver... only for Artemis to shoot Wild Dog's gun out of his hand and reveal her true intentions. Bit... anticlimactic.
But Oliver's own depressing sadness as he realizes that everyone he touches gets destroyed is, well, quite effectively told. Artemis betrayed them, Curtis is hospitalized and broke up with his husband, Felicity's boyfriend is straight-up murdered, and we get the pretty random revelation that Diggle runs back home to find a SWAT team ready for him (Lyla and John Jr. are also presumably arrested). Oh, and randomly, the final scene shows Laurel back. This is Arrow, mind you, and Laurel is as likely to be Oliver's hallucination or whatever, but I for one don't really want her back. Not that I have a problem with her actress or character, but honestly we've done the walk-in-and-out-of-death nonsense to the ground last season. As much as I want Quentin to have a happy ending, this is one part that I really didn't want revoked so easily.
Overall, though, definitely a very satisfying finale. Arrow has been on fire, basically the strongest it's ever been throughout its fifth season, and honestly there's very little other than the surprise Laurel reveal and the weak (but not particularly horrible) Artemis doublecross that I can find wrong with this mid-season finale.
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- Prometheus, in the comics, has an origin story that was the reverse of Batman's (the son of two criminals who witnessed his parents gunned down by a policeman, and is thus inspired to become a supervillain). Here, Prometheus's origin story is adapted to be the reverse of Green Arrow's, as the bastard son of a corrupt rich man whose father was killed by a vigilante for breaking the law, as opposed to Oliver's father, who killed himself in order to give his son a chance to survive.
- The AK Desmond group might be a reference to Albert Desmond, better known as the supervillain Dr. Alchemy, or Julian Albert Desmond, who is a main character in the Flash. While Julian himself seems way too unlikely to be involved in Star City's nonsense, he is said to have a company before he blew it away, so maybe it's supposed to be connected?
- Justin Claybourne is a brand-new character, and his name can actually be seen in the List way back in the first season. He's not based on any prior DC character, it seems.
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