Arrow S07E15 Review: Season Retool (Sort-of)

Arrow, Season 7, Episode 15: Training Day

Yeah, this won't be a long review. It's an entertaining 45 minutes of television that's never bad, but definitely not memorable nor entertaining. The plotline of the vigilante squad being inducted into the SCPD and struggling to work effectively within the confines of their rules is a fun little episode concept, but one that ends up just being obvious, repetitive and a little bit grating. It's just... it's just predictable, you know? They try to do things the SCPD way and fail because the police force in these superhero universes almost invariably suck. They try to cowboy it up and force a confession out of villain-of-the-week James Midas (who uses his pharmaceutical company to make... flesh-eating bullets?), who gets out on a technicality due to 'police brutality'. Then they team up with the nice policemen, eventually catching Midas in the act. Everything's just pretty lukewarm and it's probably an attempt to sell this new status quo, but it's just... it's just entertaining enough without being bad, I guess.

There are several character plotlines running through this episode, mainly Dinah struggling with her canary cry ability being injured, causing her to be an ass throughout the episode until Rene calls her out on it. We've got Oliver being Oliver. And we get the Arrowcave being used again in this episode. Oh, and I guess the no-brainer revelation that the Archer program in the flash-forward is the security system Felicity and Curtis used to develop is finally out in the open. I don't really care.

The far more interesting plotline going on is Laurel-II investigating the apparent death of Ricardo Diaz. We don't see a body, which is worrying because I really have had my limit of the character. We get a talk with Bronze Tiger, who's still not out of the prison yet, but Laurel manages to secure his allegiance by showing up with Bronze Tiger's kid... "Connor", who Bronze Tiger also calls his "little hawk". So Connor Hawke is Bronze Tiger's kid, adopted by Diggle? Bizarre, but... okay? Bronze Tiger identifies Emiko as the murderer, causing a brief confrontation between Emiko and Laurel, both holding each other's secret identity hostage. Neat, but okay.

The flash-forward storyline has Mia and Will go into a post-apocalyptic grungy trade market to get a micro-cassette player. It's... it's honestly boring, but we do need more moments of the two Queen children working together to sell their sibling relationship. The coordinates from the tape Felicity gave them leads them to the Glades, which is walled off from the rest of Star City like a reverse Arkham City. It's... it's all right, I guess, but the rest of the episode is so dang boring that I really find nothing interesting in the flash-forward stuff either. Overall, a solid, if entirely unremarkable, episode.