Arrow, Season 3, Episode 5: The Secret Origin of Felicity Smoak
It's a Felicity-centric episode, as the title probably shows. Not that it's a bad thing -- Felicity is one of the most fun characters in Arrow, and I'm all up for it. It's mostly a filler thing, though being a bit of a DC geek I was a bit over-excited when the episode goes 'I am Brother Eye'. I honestly thought we were getting an adaptation of Brother Eye, possibly as a co-arc-villain alongside Ra's al Ghul for season three, but alas, it's not meant to be. Though with ARGUS and Amanda Waller already in play, I thought it was a shame to waste Brother Eye on a filler episode like this. I've always thought Brother Eye was a cool concept, even if it wasn't handled exactly well in the comics.
Also this time around, Sheldon Cooper's Brother Eye is shaped like a Sauron eye. Oh you geeks.
Of course, the episode centers on Felicity, and like last episode where the flashbacks focused on Thea, in this episode the flashbacks focus on Felicity... which I thought was an awesome way to give the show more variety whilst still keeping to the 'Flashback B-Plot' format of the episode but not burning through too many Oliver scenes and inconsistencies in characterization, which I thought was one of the bigger weakness of the first two seasons.
Felicity herself is pretty charming in the present day, and I think this is the first episode that truly focuses on Felicity... ever? She's never truly thrust into the spotlight like this, Flash episode(s) notwithstanding. I do like how the normally perfect-and-innocent Felicity has to deal first with being an ungrateful daughter, and secondly dealing with a hidden demon from the past. And having her as having created this super-virus in the past is certainly befitting of her more mundane backstory as opposed to Diggle or Oliver. It's nothing particularly spectacular on her part, just your average Felicity antics, but I do like it nonetheless.
Felicity's mother is sufficiently embarrassing and a bit of an annoying woman, and for a moment I thought we were going to have her be this overbearing bitch that barges into Felicity's life and generally be this massive overcontrolling woman... though Felicity's comments about how her mother is a stripper in Vegas and generally been disparaging about her family in the few times she's spoken about it before this certainly doesn't help. But no, she's just like any average mother, very poorly-versed with technology and trying their best to be a good other and generally being, well, a bit of a dumb blonde, but a good mother. At least she's putting an effort. That line where she's talking about how Felicity got everything from her smarter father yet the father's the one that left, while she's trying her best to scrounge up money to raise her child in the only way she knows, well... the fight that Felicity has screaming at her mother is pretty well-written too. It's generally something which I thought would be annoying but ended up being pretty sweet.
Ray Palmer gets a few nods in this episode and dude just can't catch a break. All he wants is to talk to Felicity about this Co-Dependence project and generally be this swell guy, but he keeps getting interrupted by Felicity's mother. I mean, coming into Felicity's apartment so early in the morning is a bit stalker-y, but considering what we see Montoya did in a recent episode of Gotham I watched, it's quite tame. Ray Palmer's still quite a nice guy, and he shows to not be just a businessman but smart enough to understand the scientific angle of the stuff he is doing, which certainly is in keeping with his comic-book counterpart's role as a scientist. I don't think he's particularly going to be really important to the plot, though, other than giving a watch that served as a Chekov's Gun.
Goth Felicity! Felicity apparently is a goth with black lipstick, purple lines down her hair and has this... goth necklace thing. She's actually a shoo-in for Death from DC's Sandman title, though it's a relatively pretty generic gothic look. Anyway, we learn that Felicity dyes her hair blonde (possibly to match her mother?) and its natural colour is black. She used to be part of a hacktivist group in college... which, yeah, what with the boyfriend being evil and she being this awesome hacker, is a bit too similar with Skye's backstory in Agents of SHIELD for me. But eh.
Felicity's boyfriend is named Cooper Sheldon... which is one of the most groan-worthy, eye-rolling pop culture jokes ever. Especially since, to my knowledge, the Big Bang Theory is still running strong. But Cooper is a bit of an overtly-assertive boyfriend and is trying to hack into school loans even in college, taking advantage of Felicity's virus-creating skills to get in and basically claim credit. Reality ensues and the dude gets himself captured for breaking into a secure national site.
There's a bit of a detective thing going on where Felicity believes, in the present day, that Cooper had killed himself, but I don't believe it for a second. As it appears, NSA offered him a job and he faked his death... and apparently just let him go? In a world with Amanda Waller, I actually find this part implausible. But whatever the case, Cooper is behind the Brother Eye persona, causing blackouts and threatening to fuck up bank accounts and steal money from an armoured truck. Fucking hacktivists, man. He's a massive hypocrite, and gets all creepy with Felicity near the end. Though he gets totally beaten up by a girl despite having a gun and a hostage. That's what you get for being stupid enough to leave Felicity near a computer and going off to do whatever you did.
Overall pretty great on the Felicity end, as I keep saying.
Roy Harper gets quite a fair amount of screentime in here in his Red Arrow getup, and he gets another action scene separate from Oliver, this time actually, y'know, shooting arrows at people. I thought the arrow-through-the-RPG scene was hilarious and cool at the same time. Roy could afford to have less of a confused expression on his face all the time, but all the same I like him. And then there's the reveal right at the end about the episode with him having nightmares of... lobbing arrows like darts into Sara? What in the fuck is going on? I didn't really think that this was going to be the case, firstly because we already did Evil Roy last episode and secondly because it seems to be just a red herring, no pun intended. Plus the Ra's al Ghul setting it all up to remove a distraction from Nyssa makes so much more sense and has more potential for Nyssa turning against Ra's... but then again, might that be the red herring? It certainly makes Roy's earlier line about not getting enough sleep feel a lot more chilling in retrospect, where I initially thought that was just Roy being a lovesick bird over Thea. Certainly interested to see why Roy was the one behind Sara... is it more Mirakuru-related madness? He's certainly throwing those darts. Or is there something more to it?
Fucking confused and puzzled. And that totally came out of nowhere.
Diggle, as usual, gets less scenes than the others though he gets a really hilarious scene where he has to babysit baby Sara because Lyla is off on a mission and the nanny called in sick, whereas Oliver doesn't want to let baby Sara into the Arrowcave because reasons. I mean, there's a shit ton of pointy things and things that go boom down there, so it's definitely not the best place to put a baby, but I'm surprised Diggle doesn't argue the point more.
Laurel gets a couple of bit scenes where she's just lashing out in Ted Grant's boxing gym and later barges in like she owns the place and orders a riot unit to get to the bank. Granted it's a bad decision and Laurel is all about shitty, bad decision, but this time I don't think it's entirely that terrible. We get Quentin lashing out on her later on for nearly causing a gigantic clusterfuck, which I thought was well-deserved even if it's on the best of intentions. Though at least she doesn't throw a tantrum and be an emo self-deprecating bitch but rather actually talks to Ted Grant about it, and Ted Grant knows just how to train her. There's probably not an actual boxing training course for 'When Your Sister Has Doth Been Murdered', but hey. Oh, and Laurel chooses the black training clothes. Naturally. Because, you know, Black Canary and all.
Oliver takes the backseat in this episode. He's doing the normal Green Arrow stuff, shooting people in the face and actually taking on three machineguns. I'm not quite sure how rappelling up and doing some acrobatic things saves him from machineguns, but he's the god damned Arrow so he's allowed to do these things. There's also him finally pulling out the 'YOU HAVE FAILED THIS CITY' catchphrase which is absolutely brilliant to hear. I love that catchphrase.
Oliver and Thea get a couple of confrontations to parallel Felicity's struggles with her mother. We get confirmation that Thea still isn't aware of Oliver's double life, or at least is being a good actress about it. Oliver and Thea get into some confrontation with Thea using Malcolm Merlyn's money, which I don't think is really that big of a deal since Oliver assumes Thea hasn't been contacted by Merlyn anyway. It's just a small B-plot running in the background so it doesn't get too much attention, but they do make up at the end which is sweet, and the popcorn scene is pretty funny. Oh, and there's Merlyn looking in jealousy at Oliver and Thea eating popcorn, of course.
What else is there about the episode? Other than me getting a bit disappointed over how mundane the Brother Eye explanation is, there are a couple of other DC comics references. Sheldon Cooper was wearing a shirt with Starro the Conqueror on it when he was arrested, and Lyla was on a mission to Santa Prisca, the (I think) fictional country that Bane hails from. (Are we getting a Bane?)
I also do like the opening training sequence where Oliver and Roy are training with twin sticks, Merlyn and Thea are training with samurai katanas, Laurel is trying his best to train with Wildcat... and Felicity is just at home doing five sit-ups and being proud of herself for that... and the kicker is that the television announcer is at ten.
Overall a pretty nice episode. It's pretty filler-y and self-contained, and I'm certainly interested in the whole Roy-Sara thing which I hope will be addressed in the next episode.
training sequence opening
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