Arrow S06E05 Review: Slade's Flashbacks

Arrow, Season 6, Episode 5: Deathstroke Returns

This is actually honestly a pretty sub-par episode, only saved, once more, by the sheer awesome energy of the cast's performance. Be it Stephen Amell's Oliver Queen that's brooding and conflicted on whether to betray the promise he made to his son, or to betray his newly-reformed buddy Slade, or Slade's newfound anti-hero and failure-dad self-loathing as he goes on a one-man Deathstroke army to fuck the hell out of the men who he thinks kidnapped his son, or Juliana Harkavy's criminally-underused Dinah Drake's shock at finding out a face from her past...

Which is a shame that this episode's just... m'eh at best. Let's cover the good parts first, which is the neat focus we have on a majority of the episode on the Slade/Oliver buddy cop movie as they go to save Slade's son Jericho Joe from an international prison. Not the usual bow, arrow, machinegun and sword way, though, but with diplomacy. Because Slade actually respects Oliver's whole "I am hanging up the mask!" deal. We even get some flashbacks for this Slade centric episode, showing how even in a time when he was supposed to go camping with his kid, he uses it as an excuse to murder one of Yao Fei's associates, presumably the reason he got sent to the island all the way back in the season 1/2 flashbacks in the first place. It's nothing that particularly tells us anything new about Slade as a character, I don't think, but it's still nice to see him actually try to be a daddy. I do feel that the episode ended up showing a bit too much, and chunks of Slade's flashbacks ended up feeling sort of like padding. 

Still, Slade Wilson's return is definitely handled quite well, and his plotline to hunt down his son Joe, something that's been foreshadowed all the way back in season two, is something that works very well with Oliver's newfound dad-hood. The shock factor that the episode's not going to end this particular subplot and the fact that Joe Wilson is actually running the... Jackals, I think, the organization is called, instead of being its prisoner, is pretty well done as well. 

The B-plot involves the return of the Vigilante, who, I must confess, was something I completely forgot about after he got unceremoniously thrown off a building by Prometheus last season after the whole Adrian Chase/Vigilante thing ended up being a red herring for comic book readers. We get the revelation that Vigilante is actually... that one dude that was Dinah's boyfriend in her backstory that we assumed dead, but apparently received super-regeneration powers from the particle accelerator explosion, meaning he can survive gunshots to the head. Dinah's a character that's still a huge enigma to me, nowhere as well-developed as Wild Dog was at this point of his story back in season 5, but I dunno. Vigilante's storyline honestly felt like it ended up being kind of over with little fanfare, with Vigilante on the loose and us not really getting much. Tying Vigilante to Dinah is a smart move to give Dinah more things to actually do, but then it also ties Vigilante to the literal least interesting character on the show.

I think part of why the Dinah/Vigilante storyline didn't work out is simply because... the history between Dinah and Vigilante is certainly there, but compared to Oliver and Slade's very deeply-rooted history not just in the flashback era, but also in the present-day seasons is just so impactful that scenes of Slade and Oliver's complicated relationship and their mutual respect despite all the shit that's gone between them ends up causing them to become comrades despite it all, whereas Dinah and Vigilante's storyline felt more like 'hey, remember this one episode we had before?'

I really just didn't feel like the federal investigation storyline is going anywhere either, and every time Agent Watson (who's played by a decent actress, too) shows up I just go "ohhh no not this bullshit again". It's just so freaking boring, repetitive and not something I particularly give a shit about.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Felicity mentions Iris's bachelorette party and the hijinks that ensued, which happens in the same week's Flash episode, 'Girls' Night Out', where Felicity shows up as a guest star. 
• Slade is referred to by his contact as 'Slade the Terminator'. In the comics, Slade's full title is 'Deathstroke the Terminator', but the Terminator bit was dropped after the Terminator movies came out.
• Joe's codename, 'Kane Wolfman', is a reference to Marv Wolfman, one of the lead writers for New Teen Titans and one of the biggest codifiers for creating many of the aspects of Deathstroke that make him the badass he is now.