For weeks, hacktivist Cayden James has been terrorizing Team Arrow and Star City on the premise that Green Arrow killed his son. But things are taking a dramatic turn, as we learn who has been manipulating the manipulator.

Previously, on ARROW

With the threat of a giant bomb going off over Star City, Team Arrow has its work cut out for them. And Cayden James keeps moving the goalpost in his search for revenge over the death of his son. While it’s been implied that James is being manipulated over the last few episodes, we get confirmation here. Whoever it was that sent the forged image of Oliver as Green Arrow to the FBI has also been messing with James. And thanks to Elena, the former Helix hacker, the team found the evidence to prove it.

Instead of calling off his effort to blow up the city, James doubles down on his threats, telling the team to track down Black Siren, Anatoly and Dragon to find out which of his former partners is a traitor.

While Siren admits to being the Judas, James doesn’t believe her. In fact, the only one who wants to punish Earth-2 Laurel is Black Canary, who is still sore at Siren for killing Vigilante last episode. Dinah puts everything at risk to go after Laurel and even manages to shoot her in the gut, but Quentin is still on the search for Laurel’s redemption, and he patches his daughter’s doppelgänger up and spirits her out of Star City, hoping to bring some of the good out of her.

At the start of the season, the new Black Canary was my favorite character on the show, but along with her fellow Outsiders, she now feels like a part of the cast that’s dragging the show down. Thankfully, the secondary team’s complete disrespect towards Oliver is lessened here, but as the mission starts to wind down, Wild Dog – the most annoying of the team – continues to prove to me that Oliver should probably just put an arrow between his ears.

That leaves Anatoly and Dragon, both of whom escape when things go south when James confronts everyone. With Oliver’s son William watching, James gets reflective about what he was doing, allowing Oliver to take him down and imprison him. And that’s where things take a turn to the fatal for the hacker. The real villain behind all this, Dragon, visits James in jail, reveals everything and then murders his former boss.

With the show taking two weeks off before the next episode, this was the perfect episode to air before the break. It was a tense, atmospheric episode as Oliver, his team and the Outsiders jumped through James’ hoops and tried to save the city. When ARROW returns on March 1, we should have a new focus for the last part of the show’s sixth season. Here’s hoping it brings a revitalized energy to ARROW.