In this week’s episode, the team hunts a group of dirty cops, Laurel deals with the fallout from her trip last week and Oliver pushes forward with his plans of running for mayor.
SPOILERS AHEAD
The episode kicks off with a police sting on a drug ring that ends up in a pretty efficient elimination of all the criminals by Star City’s SWAT team. Unfortunately for two detectives, they end up coming in at the wrong time and the special unit kills them and we start off with a high body count, even by Arrow’s standards.
Meanwhile, the team shows up to a new ‘headquarters’ where Oliver fills the team in on his plan to run for mayor (eye roll). The team is quite obviously surprised by this but Oliver’s mind is made up and he’s pressing forward with his campaign (eye roll). This wasn’t the only announcement though, as he and Felicity unveiled the new Arrow Cave, which is genuinely impressive. Personally, I still prefer Harley Quinn’s suggestion of calling it The Quiver, but hey, I’ll take the new STAR Labs built Arrow Cave in lieu of the better name.
The first thing that their new system detects is the two dead detectives from the opening scene and the team rolls into action. While the rest of them investigate, Oliver goes to talk to Lance. Lance is stretched to the max with a severely constricted budget, so Oliver tells him he wants to help by running for mayor (eye roll) and asks the Captain to endorse his campaign which is, of course, met with derision.
Felicity meets with Curtis because she’s still receiving that funky code on her phone and the computer genius thinks Curtis is pranking her. Curtis figures out that the code is from one of Ray Palmer’s old OS systems and Felicity decides she doesn’t want to dig into it anymore because of the pain it may lead to. Because being dense has replaced her crying every 3 minutes this season, apparently.
The team uses evidence that Captain Lance sent their way to find a seemingly abandoned warehouse where they find the hideout of the rouge SWAT team. Meanwhile, Laurel brings her father down into her basement to show him the still extremely feral Sara. He can’t believe what he sees and can’t face what came out of the pit even as Laurel continues her downward spiral into madness as she refuses to come to terms with her sisters fate. How Sara got home is never addressed, though I somehow doubt they flew commercial. I’m still trying to wrap my head around how the writers thought this was a good way to point Laurel this season because she’s acting like a straight up horror movie villain at this point!
So, the team decides to set up the dirty cops by staging a major drug deal and Thea gets back in touch with some of her old dealers. Oliver gets Lance to leak the information to the rest of the precinct to lure the cops out and Lance demands to be there when the dirty ones get busted. Unfortunately, the dirty cops, who turn out to be from Lance’s anti-vigilante unit, were more than ready for them and they make off with the cops while completely negating the teams abilities.
After seeing Sara, Lance seeks out Dahrk who tells Lance he should put the newly resurrected Sara down. Unfortunately for Lance, Felicity has pegged Liza Warner (played by Rutina Wesley) as the leader of the rouge unit and has turned on all the police squad car cams in the city, where Oliver sees this meeting and identifies Dahrk.
Oliver confronts Lance and the two of them have a turning point. Oliver’s desire to be mayor (eye roll) is gone while Lance’s honor and morals are also gone. Lance tries to put Sara down but can’t when faced with what he’s done in order to protect his daughters. At which point the dirty cops show up to kidnap Lance.
The team rolls out to get Lance and bust the dirty cops. Oliver saves Lance but Warner ends up getting the upper hand on Green Arrow and has him at her mercy. Lance gives a passionate speech about saving the city and Warner let’s Oliver live and she is arrested. Oliver is also won over by the speech and turns to Lance to help him get close to Dahrk and finally turn things around for Star City.
The flashbacks in the episode have Oliver further infiltrating the military unit on Lien Yu by pretending to kill the woman he saved. Unfortunately for him, Conklin discovers Oliver’s ARGUS pack and learns his true plans.
The episode concludes with Oliver finally announcing his candidacy (eye roll) with the help of Thea and Laurel returns to find Sara has broken free.
In case you hadn’t guessed, I’m not a fan of the ‘Oliver runs for Mayor’ storyline. It may just be the worst move the show has taken so far. How is the man running for mayor also going to be going out at night and fighting a supernatural super villain and his army of heavily armed soldiers? I mean, Green Arrow has been stabbed multiple times already this season, how is he going to play that off on the campaign trail? I also don’t know if I can handle any more scenes where Oliver addresses the public. They are always cringe worthy.
Also, having Rutina Wesley, best known as Tara on True Blood, as the guest star was even more reasons to hate this episode as I cannot stand her as an actor. Take that and combine it with some very clearly deranged actions from Laurel and Felicity’s complete inability to figure out what’s going on with Ray, and this episode quickly shaped up to be a very frustrating one.
My only hope is that with all the groundwork laid this week (much like in The Flash), next week will lead to a better episode. Based on the previews, it looks like it’s going to be very Sara-centric, so I guess we’ll see if that turns out to just be more Legends building or it turns out to be good for the show.
P.S. Am I the only one who can’t get enough Caity Lotz?