Arrow, Season 7, Episode 17: Inheritance
I've always been sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop with Emiko -- Arrow's come to a point that "just another vigilante" isn't going to cut it, especially for such a dramatic revelation like Emiko being Oliver's sister. And being coerced and forced to serve an evil force has been done to death several times before -- Thea was duped into working with Malcolm; Laurel II was forced under duress to work with Diaz -- and just being yet another vigilante, one without a specific gimmick of her own, isn't going to be enough.So this episode... ends with a pretty neat bombshell. By this point Emiko's stuck around long enough to be part of the cast, even if I still do think that they're deliberately keeping her basically pretty generic. Of course, a combination of flashbacks and present-day happenings end up really filling in the untold gaps of Emiko's story. We get to now properly see just how much of an ass Robert Queen was without straight-up turning him into "grrr evil man" territory. Robert and Moira are... they are pretty complex characters, and I definitely love the very, very clearly conflicted portrayal of Robert here, even if his eventual decision was pretty dang resolute.
The flashbacks, of course, are all of Emiko's backstory. And when Emiko was a child, she sort of understands that Robert won't risk his other children and his wealth to be taken away by Moira, and I think this subconsciously fueled a decision in her to be stronger and better. And when she eventually meets Dante, and tries to steal from her... and ends up finding a mentor, as you do. She ends up basically being inducted into the Ninth Circle (basically the Illuminati, according to the present-day research team) and we get to see how... cult-like the Ninth Circle is. The Circle is your family, you can't have attachments to your past life, all that jazz.
But interestingly, when Emiko was a bit older, she ends up going to arrange a meeting with Robert Queen, showing that she is genuinely capable. She tries to reconnect with Robert, and even Robert himself admits that Oliver wasn't prepared to do the sheer amount of business managing that she just displayed. But, of course, Robert ends up saying that he still can't take her in for the simple reason that sh's his biological child, and he will not risk Oliver or Thea's futures. It's definitely a betrayal that stings poor Emiko. It doesn't make what she did right, but it certainly ends up making her reasoning understandable.
Because we do see Emiko hide a document from Robert during their meeting, clearly ready to show it to him... but then withholds it when Robert rejects her. We later find out that this is the schematics for Malcolm Merlyn's plan to place a bomb in the Queen's Gambit... and it's definitely pretty damn evil for her to basically condemn everyone on that boat to death in the ocean!
This slow buildup from Emiko as a "oh no, poor Emiko, she's a victim of circumstance" to slowly revealing that she's actually consciously and very willingly committing the evil things she's doing also happens in the present-day storyline. We start off with Oliver training with Emiko, and only Laurel II as the doubter that stalks Emiko. Laurel ends up telling Oliver about this, and, well, Oliver's investigation ends up with him seeing Emiko in a brand-new awesome red-and-black costume helping the Ninth Circle steal some tech. And... credit where credit's due, Oliver ends up actually talking to Emiko calmly about this, giving her a chance to explain her situation. Oliver's still very pushy, but it's definitely a far cry from how he would've acted a couple seasons ago.
Emiko, of course, actually puts up a convincing act of being unable to get out of the whole Illuminati cult, and when Team Arrow ends up showing up at a chemical factory that the Ninth Circle is hitting, Dante attacks Emiko for her apparent betrayal. And despite their reservations (Diggle brings up Andy and HIVE, a very nice callback to a plot point I genuinely forgot about) Team Arrow is very much willing to give Emiko the benefit of the doubt... until, of course, it's revealed that everything was a ruse, and that Emiko infiltrated their base to jam their system. We get a brief but awesome hand-to-hand combat between Oliver and Emiko, and later on we get a confrontation where the Ninth Circle are about to unleash gas-spewing drones all over the city.
Emiko still shows some ambiguity in what she's doing -- not killing Rene, and using the gas drones on abandoned buildings -- so I don't think a redemption is out of the question, but... but I kinda want her to just stay evil all throughout the season, y'know? Probably not to the same amount of mustache-twirling mwa-ha-ha-so-evil stuff we had with Diaz, but the revelation that Emiko isn't actually a hitman for the Ninth Circle but rather it's leader comes like a pretty neat bombshell, and she decides to stop in her current independent personal mission and finally do some real cult-leading.
We've got a coulpe of B-plots, with the brief return of Alena to help out Felicity in making the proto-Archer program that saw some use in this episode, but the main B-plot meat is definitely Laurel and Dinah. Dinah has been a character I really don't care about, but she definitely plays off Laurel pretty well. She continues on her crusade to get everyone to do things the legal way, and this time around it's DA Laurel. When a subject that really angers Laurel by mocking Quentin and his death, it seems that Laurel got the dude out of jail only to kill him... something that Laurel didn't actually do this time. It's sort of a tired trope, the "no matter how much I prove myself, you'll always see me as Black Siren" stuff... but, y'know, Laurel II was pretty dang evil back in the day.
This ends up tying in, albeit loosely, to the Emiko stuff. She reveals she's the one who killed the random gangster dude presumably to drive a wedge between her and her allies, and wants to 'liberate' Black Siren... and has the insurance of blackmail photos of Laurel and Diaz hanging out together from the last season to help out.
Overall, though, despite there being some contrived coincidences as per the norm, as well as some obvious misdirection in previous episodes (Emiko's Green Arrow outfit and List were kind of pointless, for one, with the revelation that she's the leader of one of the many super-criminal cults out there) the episode still ends up being a pretty great little exercise of bait-and-switch. I am definitely far, far more invested with Emiko as our potential main villain for the season, as opposed to "guy we met a couple episodes ago and wouldn't be remarkable if he wasn't played by Highlander" Dante.
No comments:
Post a Comment