This week, Felicity has FINALLY figured out that Ray is still alive and being held prisoner so the team plan to get him back.
SPOILERS AHEAD
We open up six months ago with the last time we saw Ray. But instead of cutting away when his lab went boom, we see he was falling out of the window. Now, back to the present day and we’re back to the Olly for mayor storyline… I’ll keep the derision of past plot points to myself this week. Olly, Thea and Alex are working out the final kinks in the campaign plans. Alex asks Thea out and despite her turning him down, they leave it open for something in the future. This is what is passing as relationship building now.
We then find Felicity amongst a slew of candy wrappers aimlessly typing (seriously, watch her hands) as she tries to uncover anything new in Ray’s recording using Skittles as fuel. Oliver shows up, Curtis makes a ‘you may be but can’t be the Arrow’ joke, and Felicity plays him the message.
We find the Lance family reunited as Sara is still coming to terms with her resurrection. Laurel is still acting like a sociopath about it, but hey, I said I’d keep it to myself this week.
We then finally get to Ray as Felicity finally tracks him back down and we find out he is being held captive – in the tiny form we all knew he would be in at the end of last season.
As Felicity and Oliver formulate a plan an obvious rift begins to form between them. Is this episode relationship drama or is this the setup for some long term drama? The device needed to resize Ray is missing one piece which happens to be held by Palmer Tech’s biggest competitor, throwing yet another wrench into the plans. And then Felicity’s mother shows up at Oliver behest, because that’s a character we all wanted to come back, right?
The team suits up to steal the missing piece, a team that happens to include two Black Canaries which has to have been the winner of some kind of fantasy draft somewhere. As was to be expected, things don’t go well and Sara ends up with a rage attack and nearly beats a guard to death. Ray manages to make contact again and Felicity catches a glimpse of his captor – Damien Darhk!
Darhk has learned about Felicity and is now using it as leverage over Ray. Dinner with Felicity’s mom is a disaster and she and Oliver have never been worse as she blames herself for Ray’s predicament and not so subtlety blames it all on Oliver. Cue a bro down between Diggle and Oliver as Oliver questions the state of his relationship. Which leads to a mom/daughter moment where Felicity goes through the same motions.
They discovers Ray’s location after following Darhk from a meeting Lance called. It isn’t going to be easy, so Sara suits back up and Curtis comes along to assemble the resizing device in the field. Green Arrow stakes out the building but before anything can happen, a totally and completely masked guard gets the drop on him and knock him unconscious.
Arrow is being held by Darhk who revels in chance at one on one time with the masked hero. Darhk dismisses the masked guard who, to my complete and utter lack of surprise, is Diggle and the plan is afoot. The plan includes Felicity and Curtis base jumping (through an already broken pane of glass if you look closely) as the team sets to work to taking down all the security measures. Green Arrow breaks free and he and Darhk start to have another dance which begins pretty much the same as the last one.
As the team works the guards, Felicity and Curtis encounter the problem of how to free Ray from his micro prison. Arrow manages to escape Darhk’s magical clutches while Ray uses some smarts to use his suit to divert enough power for the resizer to work and ATOM is back in business. They then make a big deal of Sara snapping a guards neck despite the fact that she shot three guys less than a minute ago but I guess they’re trying to make a big deal about her not controlling herself.
Ray fills the team in on some of what it was like being tiny and Felicity takes him home when he gets a clean bill of health. Meanwhile, Sara is unable to come to terms with herself and she feels she needs to leave in order to cope with her bloodlust. There’s a mention of Central City, so a possible Flash guest appearance isn’t out of the question…
Oliver and Felicity make up (which answers that question) and Lance has an encounter with a woman at a bar who is, god help us, Felicity’s mother while Thea takes Alex up on that date. We end on Darhk revealing why he was after Ray’s tech as he plans to miniaturize a section of the city.
The flashbacks this week follow up on Constantine’s visit last week as Reiter uses the piece John left to uncover a hidden message in the cave which leads them to a cove on the island and Conklin tries his best to prove that Oliver is the mole.
Yet another Legends building episode has passed on Arrow but this one ended up being not bad. It did suffer from a pair of overly schmaltzy scenes and some pretty bad on set goofs but the biggest issue with the episode was Damien Darhk. So far, they’ve tried to make him seem powerful and menacing which Neil McDonough has done a great job of pulling off. However, the instances where he’s run into the team he’s seemed completely befuddled by fighting the heroes and more like a children’s cartoon villain in his almost slapstick incompetence. Compare that with last night’s Flash where they made a very serious statement with their season’s villain, Zoom, and you can’t help but feel Arrow has made a misstep here. I’ll go ahead and chalk it up to them not focusing enough on their own show but we’ll see if that’s really the case in the back half of the season.
P.S. Arrow’s ‘intro’ is getting seriously out hand as it is upwards of ten minutes now.