Arrow S06E06 Review: Slade Jr.

Arrow, Season 6, Episode 6: Promises Kept

I may have liked this episode way more than it deserves, for the simple fact that I really, really like Slade Wilson. And I really like Manu Bennett's more anti-hero version of Slade Wilson. Perhaps that sort of character love is the same reason why I was far more lenient with Justice League compared to most other reviewers out there, but I dunno. Some degree of subjectivity really ends up entering in how much I like a work of fiction.

And, well, this episode isn't honestly particularly super-good. Evil Joe Wilson honestly comes out of the left field and wasn't foreshadowed until like literally the previous episode. The revelation that John Diggle's super-steroid drug dealer is apparently a big threat, Richard Dragon himself, is pretty tame, to be honest, and thank you Curtis for pointing out how utterly stupid Diggle is to not come to ARGUS, or to Mr. Terrific himself, or to Felicity, or to STAR Labs, or to literally everyone else who has literally done miracles to fix Diggle's broken reflexes.

And honestly? Drug addict, broken-reflexes Diggle as Green Arrow isn't the most interesting thing we could see. That's really my biggest problem with Diggle as Green Arrow. Not his race, not the fact that he's not Oliver Queen... but the fact that he's so burdened with this whole tremor hands and keeping it a secret from the rest of the group that he doesn't actually end up being the Green Arrow properly for that much. And with Ollie seeming to re-suit back up as the Green Arrow during the multi-part crisis, I'm definitely more than a little sad that we're probably not going to see much of Diggle Arrow.

Diggle at least gets some very well-done scenes, allowing actor David Ramsey to get some really great acting opportunities in with his confession to the rest of Team Arrow about his lies, his clear struggle to let the drugs burn, and revealing his secret to Lyla. There are many times where Ramsey doesn't actually say what he's feeling and lets his expressions articulate it, and as much as I think John Diggle is somewhat mis-served by the season, David Ramsey certainly does the character as much justice as he can.

And, well, thankfully the Slade Wilson two-parter makes up for it by making the episode somewhat more sane. We get to see Slade Wilson's mind in the flashbacks in the interim of returning from Lian Yu at the end of the season 2 flashbacks after the whole Amazo incident, and showing up in Starling City during the season 2 present-day scenes. It's a neat bit of gap-filling that, while not entirely necessary outside the context of this episode, adds some context to why Joe Wilson ended up jumping off the slippery path of madness and murder when it's revealed that Joe was ground zero when Slade went crazy due to Mirakuru-induced Shado hallucinations.

It's a pretty cool scene as Slade has to struggle on whether to be loyal to his son (or the monster his son's become) or to be loyal to Oliver, who's became his ally throughout all this. And as Oliver himself points out -- Manu Bennett's acting and the situation that Slade finds himself in really makes it a coin flip to where they're taking Slade. He gets to be heroic this time around, freeing Oliver and allowing him to bop Joe Wilson -- or Kane Wolfmann -- in the face.

And, well, I praised David Ramsey above, but Manu Bennett delivers an A-star performance for what may or many not be his last rodeo as Slade Wilson in the Arrowverse, particularly in the present day. His indecision, the obvious hurt that he feels at what Joe has become, and at the decision he knows deep down is right, really ends up selling Slade's motivations and emotions in the episode. And the internal history of the characters of Oliver and Slade makes the payoffs in this episode so much better. Add that to the pretty great scene of Oliver, returning after seeing how the life of being a superhero/villain fucked up Slade's life, and agreeing that putting up the cowl and mask is a great choice to raise William properly... it won't last, of course, but the sentiment is definitely nice while it lasted.

So where did the episode falter, then? I'd say Joe. He's such a... weird caricature of an eeeevil villain that contrasts so badly with the great acting that Slade and Oliver got. His motivations are muddy, and unlike the Slade/Oliver relationship, Joe is a literal new character for us, the audience. There's the huge revelation that Joe has been killing as a kid, when he first saw his dad kill the Chinese dude in the previous episode's flashback, and he's been inspired ever since... and that huge revelation felt absolutely flat. As well as the random shoehorned "I HAVE A BROTHER!" scream which feels more of an attempt to assure the audience that, yes, Grant Wilson from Legends of Tomorrow does exist. I dunno. After all the great work that Slade and Diggle and even Oliver gets this episode, Joe feels like such a huge, huge disappointment and a poor foil for Slade to come up against. And that is what makes what could've been a great episode into just good.

Add Richard "Ricardo Diaz" Dragon into the pile of disappointments, by the way. He's apparently supposed to be this season's Big Bad, but he feels so much like some random miniboss and honestly the likes of Vigilante, Joe Wilson and Cayden James have such bigger entrances into the season that Richard Dragon ends up feeling more like a flunky. Hopefully future episodes will serve him a bit better.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Felicity and William are playing the real-life video game Injustice 2, a video game that features... well, DC comics superheroes. While the characters we see them play are Blue Beetle (who hasn't shown up in CW yet) and Sub-Zero (a Mortal Kombat bonus character) it does raise some questions about how the CW version of the Injustice games came about, and how much of, say, Green Arrow and Flash's backstories made it into the game. 
• Grant Wilson, a.k.a. Ravager, already showed up in Legends of Tomorrow, in the future of Star City, taking up his father's insane crusade against John Diggle's son, who took up the mantle of Green Arrow. While Joe Wilson did go villainous for a while in the comics, for the majority of his career he was actually a superhero.
• Joe describes how his first kill was a knife sliced through some dude's throat. The comic-book version of Joe was mute, and the cause of said muteness was a knife wound across his throat, caused by Slade's enemy, the Jackal -- presumably where the Jackals gang drew its name from.
• A fair amount of references to older Arrow episodes show up. We see the origin of the Deathstroke armour-suit that Slade wears in the present-day Arrow episodes. Shado reappears. The battle atop the Amazo is referenced, and Slade sees the Oliver-Queen-is-alive news report from the pilot episode.