This week, Arrow and the team face off with a nefarious villain while a bunch of familiar faces reappear to further complicate everything.
SPOILERS AHEAD
We open on one of those familiar faces as Nyssa continues to be imprisoned in Nanda Parbat. But we wouldn’t check in just for an update and her followers break Nyssa out and they take the palace and ready themselves for war.
In Star City, the team hunts a thief with serious acrobatic skills but Thea manages to corner him. Unfortunately, she chooses that moment to black out and is barely saved by Arrow. She claims its exhaustion, but the team suspect side effects from the Pit. Felicity tries to re-solidify her position in Palmer Tech, but her being accustomed to her new limitations are making that difficult and she’s asked to step aside. Oliver goes to check in on Thea where Malcolm is keeping a close eye on her. He informs them that if she doesn’t not give into the bloodlust, it will consume Thea. Oliver gets an alert that the thief is striking again and he sets out to stop him and a parkour chase ensues. Oliver manages to grab him and he removes the mask to reveal Roy Harper who uses Oliver’s shock to escape!
Alex calls Oliver to the campaign office where he reveals that Oliver suddenly has a contender in the mayoral race and it just so happens to be Damien Dahrk’s wife, Ruve Adams. Arrow meets with Ruve and demands a meeting with Dahrk to offer him a proposition. Felicity has pieced together why Roy has been stealing seemingly random pieces of tech from around the city. When combined, they can create a type of bomb that could destroy the internet. And she called it a ‘web bomb’. I’ll talk more about this later. Anyway, the only thing Roy needs is a power source, much like the state of the art battery that she was trying to unveil. Roy beats Curtis down, even if he did put up a decent fight. But before he can leave with the battery, the team shows up and Roy flings the battery to a waiting Drone. Arrow, under Felicity’s guidance, shoots Roy with a tranquilizer.
Back in the Quiver, Felicity explains she saw some tech in Roy’s eye and so they had to stop the transmission of the device. Turns out Roy was being blackmailed by someone named the Calculator (more on this later as well) and couldn’t risk exposing the team since the contact he was forced to wear had a camera in it (this too). We cut back to find Nyssa in Japan who is looking for something called the Lotus and she must do battle with yet another familiar face in Tatsu, aka Katana. Oliver fills in Roy on Thea’s condition and he goes to see her and her wound from the old Ra’s reopens. Felicity reverse tracks the tech from Roy and the Calculator reveals his plan to destroy Star City.
So, Felicity hunts where the Calculators ‘web nuke’ (this episode is getting out of hand) would do the most damage and remembers a program Ray wrote that could help her break through Calculator’s security. As she hunts for the tech, Curtis gives her a pep talk to get her to get back into the boardroom and save Palmer Tech too. Oliver goes to see Thea and he reveals his plan to try to gain Dahrk’s help in curing Thea and she refuses to allow him to owe Dahrk anything. Malcolm, weirdly, is the one who dissuades Oliver from taking action. Felicity tracks down the Calculator who is installing his web nuke and the team rolls out, but Oliver is busy meeting with Dahrk and now he has a decision to make.
A squad or armoured goons install the device for the Calculator and Diggle, Laurel and Roy arrive to thwart them while Felicity attacks Calculators system. Just when the goons get the drop on the team, Arrow shows up and intervenes, putting down the goons. With all the pseudo tech talk happening, Arrow and team can’t detonate their bomb remotely, so one of them has to stay behind in order to keep the web nuke from going off… to which Roy obviously volunteers for, barely escaping with his life.
Now that the threat is gone, Roy has to go to ground again and luckily Felicity planted a virus to wipe out all the information Calculator had on him. Felicity delivers the speech to the board and kills it. A man leans over to pay Felicity a compliment to Oliver and it turns out to be none other than the Calculator! Roy and Thea have a heartbreaking goodbye and Felicity turns to meet the Calculator… aka her father! Oliver and Malcolm talk about respecting Thea’s decision and they shake hands as friends but Thea takes a turn for the worst as she falls into a coma. Nyssa shows up to offer Oliver the Lotus, a cure for Thea’s sickness, on one condition. He has to kill Malcolm Merlyn.
In the flashbacks, Oliver is being tortured for information on the island right before Reiter is arrowed down a mysterious assassin who reveals themselves to be none other than Shado! But, let’s be serious, it’s all a vision in Oliver’s over stimulated mind. Vision Shado is going to teach Oliver to work through his own darkness to get off the island, or something like that. Oliver and Shado meditate and she gives him a stone, telling him he has to be honest with Taina. Oliver wakes up and tells Taina that he killed her brother and physically has the stone as well.
Well, this episode certainly brought a revolving series of faces from the past. Pretty well anyone still left alive from previous seasons came back for a guest spot this week, even if only Roy got any real air time. This, coupled with what’s happening in the flashbacks, is kind of gearing us towards Oliver’s torrid past coming back to haunt him. The fact that Felicity’s father is back on the scene with the alter ego of the Calculator, is yet another person’s past who is coming back to haunt them. Seems like the back half of the season is going to have our heroes facing unforeseen consequences of their actions.
But let’s get to the core of this episode. When Speed Weed, yes that’s his real name, came on to the show this season, you can go back and check out how I made a mockery of him. He’s responsible for a legendarily bad episode of Law & Order: SVU and I don’t use ‘legendarily’ lightly. Google it! Anyway, I said back then that I hope Speed Weed doesn’t affect the quality of the show with his skills as a writer apparently matching his name in hilarity. Well, he does have a writing credit on this one and it involves the team trying to stop a ‘web nuke’. A physical bomb, that when paired with a super network sniffer, will destroy the internet. A physical bomb. That can destroy the internet.
This show, Flash and Legends of Tomorrow’s success is predicated upon us as an audience being very forgiving and not really questioning the science behind what they’re saying because we all know that the writers did a very nominal amount of research, put some semi-appropriate but very smart sounding words together and it sounds fine enough that we go along with it. I, for one, am not smart enough to debunk what they’re saying using scientific fact, so I nod in agreement whenever they use pseudo science. But even the someone with the most tenuous grasp of technology knows that something called a ‘web nuke’ is the single dumbest thing that could be proposed. I mean, this is a show with magic in it and a web nuke is still far and away, the single dumbest and most unrealistic thing that’s ever come on to the show.
Which brings me to the other inevitable problem with DC and all aspects of DC media. The multimedia titan has made its bank and its fans on the backs of its huge list of heroes and its Justice League. Luckily, Batman also has several of the most iconic villains in history because Batman’s incredible rogue’s gallery makes up for the insanely bad villains that populate the rest of the DC Universe. This episode featured a villain who has the moniker of The Calculator. The Calculator. What addled minded simpleton names DC villains? Cause they’re all bad. I mean, Marvel has its fair share of poorly named villains, but someone like Stilt Man is a joke of a bygone era that the company has left behind because it’s very well recognized that naming a villain Stilt Man is just poor writing. DC, on the other hand, loves (loves!!) putting the most idiotically named villains front and centre. Need a villain for Flash? Reverse-Flash! Need an Australian villain? Captain Boomerang! Need a villain like Mr. Freeze but without any of the nuance and without a clever name? Captain Cold! Every time we get someone like Calculator in an episode, I’m reminded of the idiocy that has to be tolerated in order to be a DC fan.
Was this a good episode? No. Mainly because it showcased just how incredibly bad of a writer Speed Weed is. He’s atrocious. It also turned the spotlight on the issues that DC fans face with DC’s famously bad names. By the way, making jokes about them does not help, instead, it makes it worse. The only good things to come out of this episode is the setup for the remaining portion of the season. A lot of things that Oliver is directly responsible for are coming to a head, so it will be interesting how the storyline with Damien Dahrk plays into these other advancing storylines. It also raises the question of whether or not it’s even Dahrk they’re referring to in that often teased cemetery scene that we’ve been seeing so much of.
Basically, this was the low point of the season, but there’s still hope for the season to finish strong. Get better, Arrow. Get better.