Arrow S07E05 Review: SAY MY NAME

Arrow, Season 7, Episode 5: The Demon

It's a pretty neat episode that sort of brings to a close this "Level Two" two-parter episode, with the enigmatic Demon being, surprisingly enough, Talia al Ghul, who's way more interesting and entertaining now that she's not just a satellite character to Prometheus anymore. And a huge bulk of this episode is just Oliver and Talia's little clenched-teeth teamwork as they try and break out of Level Two, which is a horrifying level where Dr. Parker does inhumane experiments to basically 'erase' and mould these criminals into blank slates to release them to society. With a side-effect of death, as one of Oliver's assailants in the first level finds out. A different sort of evil compared to other sorts of evil wardens we've seen in superhero stories, and one that I do find quite interesting.

Talia is.... she's pretty interesting, and her arguments with Oliver about how Oliver's killing of Ra's al Ghul has basically earned him her eternal ire is... it's a bit played out, but it is interesting to see another villain who, while not necessarily redeemed into goodness (or comedic anti-villainism like Malcolm Merlyn) is still working alongside our heroes. And while we do get another interesting argument between Oliver and Dr. Parker, the argument sort of goes nowhere because we know that Parker is less interested in making Oliver a better person that doesn't do violence and more on dehumanizing him. It's a bit of a sad end to the potentially interesting "Oliver is forced to face some hard truths" story, but we did kinda go through a similar thing with Prometheus in season five, so... eh.

Oliver and Talia gets to fight each other in a pretty badass (if short) action scene, but later on as the two of them are brought before Dr. Parker and Parker just talks about just how he's going to turn Oliver into Inmate 4587, that absolutely perfect delivery of a glorious "MY NAME IS OLIVER QUEEN!" from Stephen Ammell is just nothing short of fantastic. For something that I've heard way too many times to care, that line is so, so cathartic and badass to listen to as Oliver hammers home his true identity, punctuated with choking the man trying to de-person him. Throw in some neat little episode-long theme of Taliia insisting that Oliver became weaker for "fusing the man with the monster", and it does give us some pretty neat aspects for Oliver to ruminate upon.

This is followed up by an equally amazing fight sequence as Oliver and Talia take on a bunch of mooks, with some genuinely badass moments involving Oliver and a chain, as well as Talia dual-wielding batons. I tend to not do commentaries on fight scenes all that much, but this episode has a particularly great one!

It is kind of frustrating -- although sensible --  that Oliver doesn't want to go with Talia and escape Slabside, noting that he doesn't want to be a fugitive forever. Oliver sends Talia out of Slabside with the information to take down Dr. Parker, intent on going out of prison legally, and also noting that separating his psyche into two selves (or into no self) is not the answer. We do cut away to a weird mini time-skip as Felicity and Laurel II goes through the legal process basically off-screen, Level Two is shut down, and Oliver is sent back to regular old Slabside with Stanley.

Oh and Talia in full League of Assassin getup  straight-up murders Dr. Parker, which he totally deserved.

The B-plots of this episode are... interesting? I did feel that the Felicity/Laurel II/Dinah storyline to be a bit bizarrely out of place, since all they kind of find out is that Level Two is very much an off-site location. We already have Oliver trying to expose Parker from the inside, and the ladies' storyline just feels redundant. It does give Felicity and Laurel II some really great time to shine as they interact with each other, and Laurel II's slow, defrosting attitude is definitely well done.

Curtis and Diggle have a pretty solid B-plot of their own, with Curtis being revealed to have some superhero PTSD, afraid and not particularly willing to go back to the field after "losing so much", and seeing his idol Oliver lose equally as much. He balks (although doesn't chicken out) at being told by ARGUS to impersonate Dr. Nyambi Sonto due to his own unique qualifications with languages and sciences. It's a simple storyline of Curtis eventually working through his demons and managing to deliver a badass reply to villain-of-the-week Michael Byrd and taking the terrorists out with a gatling gun hidden in a suitcase.

There's a bunch of additional plot threads sown in this episode, like Diggle and Curtis finding an encoded painting of "Dante, He Hath Seen Hell" from the data that they confiscated, Team Felicity tracking the Silencer, and the Silencer meeting up with Diaz in Russia where he is choking poor, poor Anatoly. Ultimately, though, it's still a pretty solid episode of Arrow. I'm not sure I'm liking the ongoing storylines, but as an individual episode (or, rather, as a follow up in the Level Two mini-arc) it definitely is a very solid offering.

DC Easter Eggs Corner:

• Talia is, of course, last seen at the climax of season five where she was presumed to have perished when Lian Yu blew up. She mentions that she's been spending the time between then and now in Gotham City, where another superhero apparently managed to send her to prison. Talia's traditional enemy is, of course, Batman himself, who operates out of Gotham City. 
• It's been staring at me since the first episode of the season, but Slabside Penitentiary, a.k.a. "The Slab", is a prison in the DC comics universe where it got that nickname because most of the time, prisoners were released on a slab, i.e. dead. Oliver and Talia make a similar observation along that line when talking about Level Two.