Arrow S3E10 Review: Team Arrow Without Arrow

Arrow, Season 3, Episode 10: Left Behind

Not quite a huge, eventful episode like the Flash or Gotham episodes this week, but still, after some time without Arrow we finally return to see the aftermath of Oliver Queen's apparent death (spoiler alert: he will return) and most of the episode deals pretty poignantly with Felicity, Diggle and Roy, especially Felicity, simply just breaking down from the pressure of maintaining Star City without Oliver. It's kind of a slower chapter compared to the last one, with several plot threads running along at once -- the rise of a new villain, Merlyn's attempts to do whatever the hell he is planning, moving along the Hong Kong flashback plot with Oliver and Maseo going after Alpha, Felicity basically just falling apart, and Laurel finally donning the Canary garb.

I do like how the episode doesn't bullshit too much about Oliver being dead... to the audience, at least. Felicity, Diggle and the rest reacted pretty badly to the news of Oliver dying, but us, the audience, are greeted with numerous shots of a hooded figure dragging Oliver's corpse away from the cliff. It's actually in trailers and the two main contenders being speculated for the role are Merlyn or Maseo, and the episode reveals that it is, in fact, Maseo. And at the end of the episode Maseo recruits the help of the apparently-still-alive Tatsu to bring Oliver Queen straight back into the land of the living. Not sure how they did that. Lazarus Pit, perhaps? Whatever.

Felicity gets a lot of spotlight here, what with her breaking down, but I think this episode John Diggle and Roy Harper ends up really standing out, since Diggle in particular hasn't really done jack shit this season and to be honest Roy hasn't been doing much other than replacing Sarah as Oliver's backup. Diggle even dons the Arrow costume for the opening shot! It's apparently way too tight for him, though. I do like how they're just going on with the fight and it's a nice change of pace to see the two of them working together and beating people up and stuff like that. They're fun. We get a lot of cool Roy acrobatics... the action scenes in this episode were pretty awesome.

Felicity shows a lot more of the emotional side of things as she initially refuses to believe that Oliver is dead, and the show kind of tells us that it's only been 3 days so we're a bit behind the Flash in the timeline and this places this episode in December 2014. Felicity is just so... broken, I guess. She tries so hard to function both among Team Arrow and in Ray's company, but she ends up just breaking down. There was that scene where she just breaks down in front of Ray and telling him that she can't help him 'commit suicide', and she kind of fucked up the whole operation against Brick by calling in the cops and leading to their escape.

Ray is still fun even if I think he gets a bit too much screentime. He's continuing to work on the Atom suit, namely the gauntlet, though it's a bit too close to Iron Man scenes for my tastes. There are some troubles with chips and whatnot (and Felicity is refusing to help) and I do like the scene when he basically uncharacteristically tells Felicity to not pull the 'this is what Anna would've wanted' card. Which is definitely something a lot more fictional characters need to do, because using dead people you don't know as justification for emotionally manipulating other people, as good as your intentions are? That's disrespectful.

Meanwhile, we seem to have the rise of yet another major villain, Brick (a.k.a. Daniel Brickwell), who is one of the few DC villains that uniquely belongs to Green Arrow. I admit I'm completely unfamiliar with Brick himself and thought that he's just a big mafia boss dude, but there is apparently more than meets the eye to Brick. Not only is the guy playing him pretty charismatic and hammy... and hammy is good... he does feel threatening and when Diggle shot him in the head, apparently he has really hard skin or something going on. Mirakuru? A metahuman from Central City? He's building up an army of criminals with a grudge against Team Arrow by tearing down the legal system and destroying evidences and whatnot and, well, I'm not exactly paying much attention to all the legal stuff being waved around, but I guess Brick is going to be an arc villain similar to Brother Blood in season two.

And as much as I dislike Laurel, I must admit her build-up to taking up the mantle of the Canary (or rather, the Black Canary) is done pretty well. I do like how she's the one who keeps hanging on to hope that Oliver will return as one by one Felicity and Diggle's resolves are broken down by how ineffective they are. Though if we don't know Oliver will be coming back, I'm sure Laurel's crusade will be another in a series of self-destructive decisions. But she's apparently going to take the mantle of Black Canary at least for now, and she finally dons her costume... which, while still being black form-fitting leather, is actually different from Sarah's. Only the mask and the wig are shared. She kicks ass in one scene and I do like how she's playing it smart with Sarah's Canary Cry grenade things now.

Shame she kind of ruined her big entrance by not saying 'I'm the Canary' but some silly 'I'm the justice you cannot run from' or some cheesy thing like that.

Merlyn was pretty awesome in this episode too, stealing every scene he comes in. His sparring and constant manipulation of Thea's emotions, showing up in the Arrow Cave to deliver the bad news and everything... though I did feel that he moved from one place to another was way too fast with little to no transition. He basically moves back and forth from the Arrow Cave to Nanda Parbat and back with not much interlude in between. And for whatever reason he wants Thea to leave Star City and never return (which was what Thea said in season 2's finale, but, y'know...)

Thea was pretty strong in the few scenes she showed up in, and that scene with Roy where she's just so scared about what's happened to Ollie and asks Roy to ask the Arrow for help... that was heartbreaking for the two of them. And I do like how Thea, while still clueless about Oliver's alter ego, is at least not stupid enough to let Arsenal get past him.

The flashback side of the plot was pretty fun, with Amanda Waller being a gigantic chessmaster as always, and both Maseo and Oliver really wanting to mount a rescue for Tatsu while knowing the importance of placing priorities. I do like how Oliver helping Maseo out by placing a tracer on one of China White's goons ended up earning him the life debt, and the two scenes are placed pretty well next to each other. Oliver still has some problem killing people, and it's interesting what's going to happen in between Hong Kong and the start of season one that turns Oliver from the reluctant assassin that he is here and the cold-blooded killer he will become. I also do like how this allows Oliver to still have a presence in the episode while being almost entirely absent in the present-day scenes.

Also, interestingly, both Maseo and Tatsu survive Hong Kong in the present day (and Maseo isn't a gender-swapped version of Katana like many people speculated), but they are living apart. And Katana's comic-book backstory involved the deaths of her entire family. So maybe something bad is going to befall their son?

It's a pretty strong episode, if not particularly a spectacular one. But for a more emtion-oriented episode with several nice action scenes, it's one that lets the supporting cast shine. Granted I thought the pacing could've been better as Merlyn seemed to be a pretty quick way just to get the plot from points A to B, and the flashbacks do take up a fair too much of the episode's runtime, but in my opinion it's still a pretty solid episode.