Arrow S05E11 Review: Talia and Black Canary

Arrow, Season 5, Episode 11: Second Chances

Okay, let's get this out of the way -- it is monumentally dumb for Oliver to be so obsessed at forcing Tina Boland to basically play ball and become Black Canary simply because she dresses in black, coincidentally has the same powers and a vigilante. The sudden obsession with recruiting a new Black Canary felt immature and strange, and just a very odd way to shoehorn a new incarnation of Black Canary into the show just as Laurel leaves it. Other than the silliness of the premise (which is even lampshaded by Ragman going all 'barkhest', which means 'fate'... I say it means 'lazy writing') and thus the weakness of some of the Oliver/Tina conversations, the rest of the episode is pretty strong.

It does help that Tina (or, well, Dinah Drake, cheeky show makers) is given a very good backstory. Sure, as far as comic book backstories go it's not overly creative, but it's pretty interesting. Tina's powers are given to her by the particle accelerator explosion over on the Flash, and she's this former undercover policewoman who's spent the last couple of years hunting down the bad guy that killed her lover. The villain, Sean Sonus (a.k.a. Discord, in the comics), is a bit two-dimensional, just a douchebag drug dealer with powers that are similar to Count Vertigo* in application, but not quite in how it works. Very cool to have elements of Flash bleed over to Arrow, as always, especially when it's handled in a way that still feels at home here.

*Whatever happened to the second version of Count Vertigo, I wonder? He just disappears shortly after his big debut....

Tina is the right mix of being fun yet vengeful at the same time, and I'm absolutely hilarious that Oliver's attempts to talk her down from murdering Sonus ('what would your friend want?') fell flat on his face, because, let's face it, Oliver's only met Tina like half a day ago, like hell she's going to abandon a three-year-old grudge after a simple conversation. But the talk about second chances and whatnot ends up winning her over at the end, and it works pretty well for me, even if I'm unconvinced we needed a random replacement shoehorned in so fast... though since this is a clever, sneaky case of 'canon character all along', and Tina herself is already interesting from both her personality and backstory, I really am looking forward to seeing more of her in the future.

Wild Dog and Mr. Terrific have a nice little bonding moment about how they're all kinda broken before Oliver found them, and it's cool seeing Mr. Terrific in a more supporting role and at one point getting so excited he forgot to do the scary superhero voice.

Also awesome is the cameo-but-not-actual-cameo by the Flash, where Oliver basically tells Barry to Flash in a note in front of Captain Singh (nice to see him after being absent in his home series for so long) to show that Green Arrow is legit.

Felicity has a bit of a B-plot this episode where he needs to dig around for some information that would get John Diggle out of jail, but it's information that no longer exists in the internet. This causes her to meet up with a fangirl of her over in the Dark Web, who convinces her to return to her hacktivist roots. This fangirl ("MojoSledgeHammer" or something?) does deliver and allows Felicity to get the legal information to free Diggle, which is great, but the introduction of this mysterious Helix organization, and Felicity having to ask herself whether she'll do more good now as part of thie Helix hacktivist organization is going to be interesting. In contrast, the Diggle plotline felt like it was resolved out of nowhere relatively quickly after Diggle was put in jail again, but it never was interesting, so...

The flashback episodes are also particularly strong, with Talia Al Ghul being far more interesting compared to her TDKR counterpart, and it's revealed that Talia is actually the huge missing piece in-between bridging Oliver's flashback self and his season one self. Talia's the reason Oliver compartmentalizes his vigilantism into an alternate persona, Talia apparently coins the 'someone else, something else' phrase, Talia's the reason for the hood and bow, Talia's also the reason Oliver knows about the League of Assassins. She's a very interesting character, and while the flashback episode just involves Oliver and Talia killing a child sex trafficker to get closer to Kovar, Talia's still very much intriguing on her own. She has this nice balance of regal experience to be Oliver's mentor in all things vigilante, yet a nice bit of psychopathic moment when she seems to be downright turned on when Oliver kills the pedophile.

Overall, despite the odd premise, definitely a very strong episode.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• We get a flashback to Sonus and Tina/Dinah being transformed by the Particle Accelerator explosion, with a repeat of the news report. Of course, the particle accelerator explosion is the event is the one that gave Barry Allen -- and so many other superheroes/supervillains their powers. 
• Tina Boland is a brand-new name, but her real identity, is not. Dinah Drake is the name of the Golden Age Black Canary, mother to the second Black Canary, Dinah Laurel Lance. (In a bit of a hilarious example of referencing the same thing twice, Laurel and Sara's mother in this show is also named Dinah Drake). Though obviously, with the Lance family being firmly established, Dinah Drake now has absolutely no connection to the Lance family whatsoever. 
• Dinah Drake borrows several elements of the first and second Black Canaries. Her name owes to the comics' Dinah Drake, but her sonic scream being an innate power instead of technology stems more from the second Black Canary. Her backstory with her having a police husband, Larry Lance (adapted into Arrow as Quentin Lance), stems from the first Black Canary's backstory. 
• Discord (a.k.a. Sean Sonus) is actually a Green Arrow villain! After so many villains being imported from Batman's rogues gallery or flat-out created for the show, It's refreshng to have one of Green Arrow's few villains to make an appearance. Discord in the comics was a cyborg instead of a metahuman, and uses sound-based attacks.
• Yao Fei's full name is given as Yao Fei Gu Long.
• In the comics, Helix was a group of six confused supervillains that later disbanded and became good guys, with its most prominent member, Mr. Bones, actually becoming the leader of the D.E.O.