Arrow, Season 5, Episode 19: Dangerous Liaisons
I'm finding it increasingly hard to review Arrow without going into huge speeches about the morality divide between Felicity and Oliver, and some bouts of hypocrisy going on between the two, but that will take way, way too long and I'm like three months late with these reviews as it is, so let's just go and burn through the last few episodes of Arrow's fifth season.
So, yeah. This episode wraps up the Helix sub-plot that ran for Felicity throughout a good chunk of the fifth season, and to no one's surprise, it turns out that Helix isn't the cool army of 'stick it up against the big man!' freedom fighters or whatever, and they have agendas of their own. Sure, they might not be as mwa-ha-ha evil like Prometheus or Damien Darhk or Ra's al Ghul, but they are a different breed of villain... a line that's further blurred by the actions of ARGUS, the big shifty government organization.
So, let's put the cards on the table. ARGUS is a government organization that's been doing really shifty and morally ambiguous stuff, like keeping prisoners without trial on a black site. On the other hand, you can also say the same to our main heroes for working outside the law, and really, is keeping Cayden James* any different from Team Flash imprisoning metahumans in their basement, or Team Arrow keeping Slade locked up in Lian Yu? But at the same time, you can totally sympathize with Helix for wanting to break out their boss, and your mileage will vary on whether Alena killing the ARGUS agent with the elevator is really justified or not. She claims it's an accident, but she's not too bothered by it. So, yeah. Helix might not be a super-villainous group of bad guys like the Legion of Doom or the League of Assassins, but they're still dangerous, and as much as ARGUS's methods are questionable, it's also not hard to root for ARGUS, despite them bending the rules a fair bit.
*who isn't a character from the DC comics, as the internet calls me. Not that he matters, really, because he doesn't even get a single line of dialogue.
Of course, last episode ended with Adrian Chase escaping, and while the man doesn't physically appear in this episode, we did get Team Arrow going on the offensive to hunt him, only to be greeted with a rather hilarious bit of Chase weaponizing a bunch of old-timey arcade machines as a death-trap. It's so surreal and it's something you'd expect from a villain like Joker or Trickster or Toyman, but I, for one, loved the scene.
The episode then quickly moved into the Helix subplot, and, boy, it's a doozy to talk about. See, a good chunk of whether you like this episode or the whole Helix storyline is going to depend on how much you like Felicity or not, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that she's easily one of the most controversial characters on the show. I've never truly hated her, even at the heights of the Olicity plot tumours, but I also recognize that she's had some questionable stretches over the years. But while breaking up the couple might be a decision that shippers are pissed off about, I do think that it's nice for Felicity to grow beyond 'the girlfriend' into having independent character arcs of her own. Last season had some decent moments between her and Calculator, but this season has done a pretty great job -- first with her interactions with Ragman, and now with Helix -- to make her grow into her own character.
Felicity's increasingly dangerous alliance with the hackers of Helix is compared, rather justifiably, with Oliver's own alliance with the Bratva... which, as we saw, backfired pretty spectacularly a couple of episodes ago. Oliver tries to basically get Felicity to not repeat the same mistakes that he did, but Felicity also makes it clear that she's seen Oliver throw his lot in with many questionable characters in the past, and she's going to do whatever the fuck it takes to bring down Adrian Chase, because it's not like any of them are having any luck at doing it. And when there's a resource to be used...
And, of course, Helix is a group that works on the quid pro quo system. It's only a matter of time before Helix wants Felicity to do something that's far more direct in its harmfulness, something that's more than just 'hack this drone that we're totally not going to use for nefarious purposes'. It's nice to get all the Helix story cleared out of the way, to be honest, to give it the focus that the arc needs instead of dogpiling it all at the end.
It's an episode that's performed relatively well. There's no real answer as to who's right or wrong. Oliver or Felicity, ARGUS or Helix, Diggle or Lyla, all sides of the argument have a point. And that's honestly a nice reflection about just what real life connections are. Lyla, replacing Waller as head of ARGUS, finds that having the nice black-and-white morality that her husband shares isn't that easy at all, especially when dealing with someone that can potentially bring down entire countries from the back of a computer, but at the same time it's a slippery slope and keeping information from Oliver and Diggle about Hayden's real whereabouts or holding Hayden without due process are both actions that can as easily be justified as they can be damned.
And while Felicity helped out Helix, even trapping Oliver in a laser cage to help Helix escape, ends up being cut off by Helix. Helix abandons their facility and leaves the show for the time being, though they are decent enough to leave Felicity a bunch of technology that she can use to track down Chase... and a whole lot of confused feelings. She's effectively betrayed Oliver and Team Arrow, and while it might be for something that she views is a justified cause -- whether it be rescuing a man that's imprisoned unjustly, or vengeance for her boyfriend Billy -- it's still a lot of gray areas and I'm a big fan of it. I don't doubt that Team Arrow will accept Felicity back with open arms (I mean, they did so for Oliver and many others) but the wedge this will drive through Oliver and Felicity's already rocky relationship is not going to be pleasant for either of them.
There are a couple of B-plots, like Diggle and Lyla's fight -- which, while not ending with them separating (I don't think Diggle will do that to his son), was still frosty between them. And Rene and Quentin go through a rather long-winded bit of why Rene hasn't tried to fight for the custody of his daughter yet. It really makes sense why Quentin would push for Rene to meet his daughter, having lost both of his, and while I did find it rather convoluted to have Quentin press Rene all the time when the answer ends up being a simple 'hey, I don't wanna hurt her, okay?' line would've worked, but eh, it's a small complaint, and the scene at the end with Rene basically melting down and being an adoring daddy when Quentin arranged for his daughter to show up, thus convincing Rene to fight for her custody, is pretty heartwarming.
It's a pretty solid episode, really, whether you like Felicity or not, and a good part as to why the episode really felt so solid is that it's uninterrupted by any flashbacks. Yes, the Russia flashbacks have generally been some of the best that the show has had to offer, but with the Russia flashback ending with presumably Oliver's return to Lian Yu and the start of the first 'present-day' sequence in Arrow's first season, hopefully the show will finally decide to abandon the flashback thing altogether in the upcoming season six, because, shit, it's a far more efficient way of storytelling.
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