Previously on ARROW…
After an altercation in the subway with Emiko and the Ninth Circle, where Team Arrow stopped Oliver’s half-sister from setting off a biological weapon that would take out most of the city, the whole team gets dragged in for questioning to answer for the deaths of two transit guards. But all is not as it seems.
The team is getting raked over the coals by Dinah and the stereotypical angry desk sergeant from TRAINING DAY (the season’s 15th episode, not the Denzel Washington movie). Sgt. Bingsley wants to throw the book at someone, anyone, on the Star City Police Department’s covert ops team and uses the debriefing to make sure we all know how bad everyone on the team looks on paper. He’s especially hard on the returning Roy Harper, who was called in to try and throw off the Ninth Circle – and because he’s really good at Parkour.
The whole idea that the SCPD is still riding Team Arrow hard about their methods is bordering on ridiculous, considering how often Oliver has saved their asses, and it gets especially annoying with Dinah giving them all grief over the mission. But Dinah’s attitude is a classic bit of misdirection, as we find out late in the episode that not only was Dinah on the mission, but she was in on the cover-up.
It turns out Bingsley was on to something when he was accusing Roy of killing the two guards. It wasn’t the Mirakuru he had injected in the second season that pushed him into an insane rage, though. Oliver figures out the truth, that Roy died while out in the world with Thea and Nyssa al Ghul, and Oliver’s sister and his ex-wife used one of Ra’s al Ghul’s Lazarus Pits to bring him back to life. Roy had managed to control the blood lust that comes with returning from the dead, but something set him off in Star City.
Again, we have a more mature, more understanding Oliver than we’ve had in the past. He’s completely supportive of Roy and what he’s been through, and the rest of the team has his back the whole episode, going so far as to lie to Bingsley and blame Emiko for the deaths of the transit guards.
The lines between “good guys” and “bad guys” have become a little blurred, but at least Oliver & Co. aren’t trying to set off bio weapons to kill the city as revenge for daddy Queen not loving them enough. Oliver confronts Emiko and she reveals that not only she leading the Ninth Circle, not only is she vowing to see Oliver’s life destroyed so she can watch him suffer, but she tells Oliver that she could have told Robert Queen that Malcolm Merlyn had targeted the Queens’ Gambit to be blown up, but she decided to let him die.
We don’t have many episodes left in the season, so hopefully Oliver realizes that there’s probably no reforming his crazy, angry half-sister. Especially after she blows up the building the team is in and Oliver is left laying under piles of rubble.