Arrow, Season 4, Episode 17: Beacon of Hope
So, yeah, Felicity quit Team Arrow, and this episode focuses on her trying to strike out as her own as head of Palmer Tech. A full civilian and no longer Overwatch of the Arrow Team. It's far more reasonable now that the recent crisis of Damian Darhk is apparently contained with the dude spending time in prison, so you can't fault her for that. I'm curious what the direction for Felicity is going, and she certainly is a lot more fun to watch now that she's no longer strangled by the Olicity ship, having some shades of her old fun old geeky-competent hacker return to her in this episode. I'm curious if the writers are intentionally writing Felicity out to push for the (comic-canonical) Oliver/Laurel ship, though the two's dialogue throughout this exhausting ordeal really only shows mutual friendship more than romance. Maybe they just want Felicity out of the way for... reasons? For her to have a slightly less role until she becomes a supporting guest star in future seasons a la Roy Harper?
Well, regardless of what direction Felicity is taking, Beacon of Hope is a more than welcome break from all the drama-strangled doom and gloom we're getting from Arrow, and all it takes is shifting the focus away from all the darkness and instead have Felicity, Thea and Donna face off against Brie Larvan (a.k.a. the Bug-Eyed Bandit), the criminal who Felicity and Ray helped Team Flash to put away way back in a crossover episode last year. The three of them worked really well, play off each other well as Donna is just confused at all this secret elevator, supervillain and bee robot thing going on. Man, remember when Donna was an annoying necessity to the show? She's definitely grown on me.
Having Curtis Holt get a big role as he struggles with his infection, his fanboyism over the superheroes and Oliver being aggressive towards his light-hearted demeanour is another great part of the episode as well, with the future Mr. Terrific seemingly poised to replace Felicity as the team's resident mission control. Curtis is indeed one of the best parts of season four, and his outing here, helping to hack Brie Larvan's bees, figure out what's going on with them, and fighting against a single drone with Quentin is hilarious, and I can't fault the show swapping out Felicity for Curtis.
Brie Larvan is happily dispensing bee puns all throughout the episode, and her swarm of bees and that Yellowjacket knockoff gestalt bee fighter-man (who's totally not a man in a suit, honest) are pretty impressive visual effects. She also gets some sympathy because her big assault this time around is precipitated on her wanting to gain the same walking technology that Felicity possesses, but I felt that they missed an opportunity by having Larvan have actual enmity against Felicity. It's odd that they acknowledge Felicity's role in Larvan's capture in her previous outing, but they don't really build up on it much.
Also, Andy Diggle is apparently working with Malcolm Merlyn, a welcome wrench in the whole HIVE situation. What is Merlyn planning, and is he trying to once more usurp the role of the main villain? Darhk isn't completely idle in the prison, too, pulling off a Kingpin and basically dominating the prison bullies who tried to shiv him by threatening their families outside. And we also get a welcome return of another past villain, Murmur, who seems set up to be Darhk's main flunky now that HIVE has apparently disowned him. Murmur doesn't do much here, but Darhk displaying superiority even without magic totem powers really helps to build him up as being dangerous even without his magic powers.
Speaking of totem powers, the flashback... is really stretching scenes, yeah? This episode's flashback is just Reiter tapping into totem powers while Oliver and Taitana tries to survive and figure out what's going on. Just have an episode devoted to the flashbacks and be done already, stop distracting us with one-fourth of a scene every fifteen minutes!
But other than that, yeah, this is a pretty decent episode of Arrow! A fun outing, showing off a lot of great scenes from a lot of characters. It builds up the bigger and darker HIVE conflict, reintroduces a villain from the past and shows how Felicity and Curtis can be viable as characters in the show's future. What can I say? Remove the tired shipping plots, and even without the extra-wacky factor that this episode has, Arrow still has enough juice in its tank to deliver good episodes.
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