Arrow, Season 8, Episode 3: Leap of Faith
So we continue, at least for the moment, the trend of homaging different aspects of Oliver Queen's journey over seven seasons of superheroing. We've got a call-back to the original state of Starling City in episode 1, and the Hong Kong plotline in episode 2, and this one calls back the long League of Assassins storyline that took place primarily in season 3, but also across subsequent seasons. It's also a nice little cap-off to how that plotline has been implied to be brewing in the background with Thea, Nyssa and Roy supposedly going around blowing up Lazarus Pits and whatnot.
The 2019 era storyline is pretty neat. In his journey to hunt down anything that might tell him any sort of information about the enigmatic being that is Mar Novu, Oliver ends up returning to the abandoned fortress of Nanda Parbat, eventually meeting up with his sister Thea, and Willa Holland is always welcome to see on this show, being one of the more criminally under-utilized characters when she was on the show. She got better near the end of her run on Arrow, for sure, and it's nice to see Thea back and basically giving Oliver some neat life advice on her own -- that talk on the ridge next to the mountain about their parents was easily one of the highlights of the episode, with the chemistry between Amell and Holland really being fantastic.
The rest of the episode honestly plays off in a surprisingly mundane way. Talia al Ghul shows up as a reluctant ally that ends up double-crossing them; the Thanatos Guild and Athena, which are a group that was foreshadowed but we never really follow up on, end up fighting the three main characters, and there's a silly Indiana Jones feel going on as our heroes enter Nanda Parbat to try and look for a specific scroll hiding a little metal ball that's also a star map or something. There's a bit of an argument about how Oliver still refuses to treat Thea as an adult superhero and tells her to stay behind at one point, but this ends up being pretty much glossed over with a "I told you so" by Thea, while Thea just basically rolls her eyes and goes "god my brother is so protective" instead of being enraged. Basically, the moral of the story is that they're stronger together, and doing this superheroing business alone is folly.
Anyway, at the end of the episode Athena gets killed by falling rocks, while Thea and Talia are somehow working together to create a non-assassin League of Assassins, which... okay? I'm genuinely not sure where they keep getting a seemingly endless supply of people willing to become ninja assassins, but okay. That farewell between Thea and Oliver is genuinely heartwarming.
The 2019 B-plot sort of folows up on the Lyla thing, but not really. Diggle and Lyla head off to save Bronze Tiger's wife, Sandra Hawke, as well as her young son Connor, who we know will eventually come under Diggle's care. There's a neat call-back to the Suicide Squad episode with Gholem Qadir's son being the villain of this one, but ultimately it's not particularly noteworthy, I feel.
The 2040 plotline is even less noteworthy, not helped by the genuinely generic dialogue that our heroes are supposed to belt out and how interchangeable most of the characters are. There's supposed to be a parallel to "trust your partner in the field" to the Diggle/Lyla and Oliver/Thea situations, and this time it's Mia and Connor... but the conflict is honestly bland, the dialogue superficial, and even setting up J.J. as a generic terrorist leading the Deathstroke gang doesn't really amount to all that much. At the end of the episode J.J. ends up stabbing Zoe and seemingly killing her...
...and then in a genuinely unexpected twist, Mia, Connor and William get transported to 2019 in the bunker, which... okay! That, I did not see coming. The 2040 scenes in this season haven't been working at all for me, feeling like generic placeholder scenes with flat characters, so it's going to be great to see the Arrow kids interact with their parents. This means we don't have to detour every episode to check in with the 2040 storyline that won't really matter for the purposes of this season (save it for the spinoff) while also allowing the actors and characters to interact with the main Arrow cast. And, hey, it's "world will collide", and apparently this extends across time, too.
Overall, it's kind of a strange direction to take this episode in, but I can't argue with the results. The interactions between Oliver and Thea is worth the price of admission alone, and while a lot of the Nanda Parbat stuff feels kind of like filler to take up the entire episode, it's all right and pretty entertaining. Next episode's going to be pretty interesting for sure, with this unexpected crossover!
DC Easter Eggs Corner:
- This time around, it's the League of Assassins storyline that gets the homage treatment. Nanda Parbat was a major location throughout season three, while a lot of storylines regarding to the League of Assassins are followed up from subsequent seasons -- the Thanatos Guild and Thea's journey to destroy the Lazarus Pits are from season six; Talia is a major character in seasons six and seven, where she had worked together with Oliver in the latter; Malcolm Merlyn's rise and fall as head of the League played out over multiple seasons.
- The Tomb of Al-Fatih is apparently located on the same mountain where Oliver and Ra's had their iconic mid-season sword duel in the season three episode "The Climb".
- The Gholem Qadir mission, and the fact that Lyla and Bronze Tiger were involved in it, took place in the season two episode "The Suicide Squad".
- Thea notes how she udes her mother's middle name, Mia, while in Corto Maltese throughout the early half of season three. Mia, of course, is the name of Thea's comic-book counterpart.
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