Previously on ARROW…
Last week, the team tried to pull a USUAL SUSPECTS on the SCPD as they worked to protect Roy Harper from getting the rap for killing the two transit guards in the battle with Emiko. This week, with a similar unreliable narrator as Oliver recovers from getting trapped under the rubble caused by the explosion set off by his half-sister Emiko.
But while Oliver is trying to find a way out, Felicity finds herself in a good deal of trouble herself, as Sgt. Bingsley comes to the Queen apartment to arrest Felicity after Emiko tips them off that Roy was actually the one to kill the guards. Sgt. Stereotype has a warrant to investigate Felicity for any number of hacking crimes, but she won’t go quietly into this good night and she won’t go down without a fight. She knocks the cops out with her new security system and drags her SmoakTech coworker Alena out of the apartment and into the bunker.
Running from the law – again – has Felicity a little concerned about the life she would be able to give her unborn child, and we finally see the path taken to the problems the Canaries are dealing with in the 2040 flash-forwards. Felicity turns the Archer program to Alena, and Alena turns the program over to the Galaxy Corporation and they in turn bring martial law to Star City and the Glades. And now, 20 years later, Felicity is trying to make things right.
I don’t usually comment on the flash forwards, because they lost my interest a long time ago, but one thing here really bothered me from a continuity standpoint. Adult William complains to his half-sister Mia that Felicity and Oliver abandoned him and wanted nothing to do with him. Yet, he was the one who said he wanted nothing to do with them earlier this season, choosing instead to go with his maternal grandparents! Maybe that will get paid off next episode, but somehow I doubt it.
Back in the rubble, while Oliver is pinned under a lot of concrete, he gets a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Past, his dead best friend Tommy Merlyn. Tommy is trying to get Oliver to work through his anger at Emiko so he can break the cycle of hate and anger and violence that started with his father.
If the rhetoric that Oliver and Tommy were debating seemed familiar, it’s because it’s exactly what the doctor at Slabslide Penitentiary was trying to feed to Oliver. Clearly, the lessons from the prison shrink stayed with Oliver, considering he’s having his dead best friend argue it to him as a “test of his resolve,” as Oliver put it. But his psyche goes a little bit farther, showing Oliver that if he continues on the path he’s on, every one of his friends and family will die.
Seeing arrows in the hearts of Team Arrow breaks the spell and shows Oliver that he needs to take a different approach than killing Emiko, as its revealed that everything in the exploded compound was a figment of Ollie’s imagination and the rest of Team Arrow finds Oliver and brings him out from under the rubble.
Oliver confronts Emiko one more time and tries to reason with the crazy lady, but she won’t listen and escapes with the biological weapon the Ninth Circle stole from the army to set up the season finale.