A vax from Merlyn saves the day,
And Flash briefly comes out to play,
And while he's sympathetic,
He offers a pathetic
Handwave as to why he can't stay.
Then, somewhat to my dismay,
Katana steps out of the fray.
But Ollie, still sane,
Sabotages the plane
The trap's sprung, but Ra's still gets away.
Ra's wants to make the virus spread,
But Thea's back, now decked in red.
And newly-supported,
The team sees the plan thwarted,
And Oliver kills Ra's stone dead.
Freed from being Ra's' tool,
Nyssa goes back to ninja school,
Only to find
That there's no peace of mind,
For Merlyn's the new Ra's Al Ghul.
Now Ollie, guided by a dream,
Chooses to pursue a new stream.
And thus it transpires
That Ollie retires,
And leaves the city to his team.
I've said this show could be a gem,
If it would focus on the femmes.
Now we're happ'ly aligned
To leave Ollie behind
And retool the show around them.
Ollie's, by now, purged of all pity,
And his affect seems all dark and gritty.
And now he's come through,
He is thusly meant to
Marry Nyssa, then kill Starling city.
But he has a new plan unfurlin',
That, with luck, will set us whirlin'
Although it's unclear
Where it all goes from here,
He's secretly plotting with Merlyn.
To Starling town Merlyn then treks
To recruit those who Ollie respects.
They launch an assault
On old Ra's Al Ghul's vault,
And Tatsu puts a sword through her ex.
Ollie's meant to confuse and inspire us,
Though the flashbacks continue to tire us.
So Akio's dead,
Ollie's soon to be wed,
And his friends are locked up with the virus.
It*s not meant to be understood
Whether Ollie's with the brotherhood.
Nobody knows.
That keeps us on our toes,
And this ep was uncommonly good.
Ra's Al Ghul has a hidden scheme,
And wants Oliver on his team.
And through some blackmail,
He acquires his grail,
So Ollie's training as Al Sah-Him
We get some more flashbacks for filler,
But Ra's' hand's still on the tiller.
And Nyssa's betrayal
Was beyond the pale,
So Oliver's sent back to kill her.
John's wife, newly un-estranged
Is kidnapped and pulled out of range.
He starts an attack
To try getting her back,
And there's a violent hostage exchange.
As for Nyssa, Ra's still declares her
A traitor, and so he ensnares her.
He says execution's
The only solution
But at the last minute, he spares her.
At the end, we hear the same old ditty
Of population control without pity.
So his ninja clan
Will soon enact his plan
To unleash a virus on the city.
Last time, Ra's stabbed Thea, then fled,
And given just how much she bled,
It beggars belief
That to our slight relief,
She ends up in a coma, not dead.
But this was hardly a botched hit,
And Ra's just refuses to quit.
And says, to their chagrin,
That if Ollie gives in,
He'll let them use the Lazarus Pit.
With no choice, Ollie takes this route,
And lets the succession come about.
Though while they hold court,
The league has to thwart
Abortive tries to break him out.
Ollie's friends try to give chase,
But he thinks their efforts are misplaced.
He says 'bye to each friend,
And so by the end
He's ready to be the new Ra's.
Whatever the villainous cackles,
Or whatever drama it tackles,
The plan of attack
Will always be held back,
For the flashbacks are still self-made shackles.
Roy's gambit was foolish, but brave,
And soon might send him to the grave.
The team thinks they can
Work out some kind of plan,
But Lance unearths the Arrow Cave.
But then, they have to improvise
As a new villain starts to arise -
An unpleasant soul
With ambiguous goals
And lasers coming out of his eyes.
With cops' eyes upon him all day,
Ollie is no longer free to stray,
But the ball can't be dropped,
And Deathbolt must be stopped,
So instead, the task falls upon Ray.
Team Arrow remains in no doubt
That Roy's escape must be brought about,
So within a short span,
They carry out a plan
To fake Roy's death to break him out.
With all plan A's chances now fled,
Ra's makes a new one in its stead.
And so his rebuttal
Gets rather unsubtle:
He seems to kill Thea stone dead.
So Ra's has dispatched an array
Of fake Green Arrows into play.
And just to inflame
This extravagant frame,
Faux-Arrow just up and shoots Ray.
The cops now won't back down or flee,
'Til the Arrow's their detainee.
And just to be sleazy,
Ra's makes their job easy
And outs Ollie's secret ID.
Ray's health is still on the downswing,
But the one thing this subplot can bring
Is merely to tie
Up Felicity's eye
So she can't just resolve everything.
And really, Ollie's actions have been
Getting much harder to spin.
Whether out of remorse
Or a matter of course,
Ollie finally turns himself in.
There's a great scene on the police bus
As Quentin and Ollie discuss,
But all of that sport
Is abruptly cut short
As Roy tries to pull a "Spartacus"
Digs and Lyla are getting remarried,
And hope to honeymoon unharried,
But find that they fast
Get caught up in the past
They'd hoped had been briefly buried.
Waller seems eager to tap
The two for an overseas scrap.
Deadshot comes along,
Which seems a bit wrong,
But the mission ends up as a trap.
We get flashbacks of Deadshot as grunt,
Recently returned from the front.
And at bloody long last,
We get looks at the past
That actually are relevant.
Meanwhile, Ra's kills with the aim
Of making Ollie take the blame.
Ray, as a tech wiz,
Learns just who Arrow is,
But he's still not convinced it's a frame.
Felicity and he dispute,
And she makes him give up the pursuit,
But not before he
Flies off on a spree
In his budget Iron Man suit.
While some bits lack dignified style,
The rest can still raise quite a smile.
So, after a fall-off,
Suddenly all of
This episode is quite worthwhile.
So, Ra's still wants Ollie as heir
And exploits those about whom he cares.
Ollie agrees
So he'll let them go free,
And so they escape from his lair.
Ollie's misdeeds through the season
Have, oddly enough, not been pleasin'.
So, though he was missed,
Everybody's still pissed,
And mostly for very good reason.
A new crimelord's after the prize
Who's sewn shut all but his eyes.
But the police cap
Still gives Ollie the rap
For not telling of his daughter's demise.
Ollie's jealousy is a farce
That Felicity finds hard to parse.
Folks shut out the voices
Of sensible choices,
And the flashbacks are still a right arse.
Disowned, Nissa thinks on a whim
To teach Laurel how to be grim.
While Ra's does his harm
To drive Arrow to his arms
By turning the city against him.
Team Arrow prepares for a blow
From a massively better-trained foe,
And the rest of the run
Is just everyone
Being told things we already know.
But Ra's' League is still in play,
And they really want someone to pay
For Sarah's demise,
So to no one's surprise,
The League just takes Merlyn away.
But Ollie, perhaps 'cause he's high,
Decides he can't let Merlyn die.
But through all the surprising-
-ly weak moralizing,
He won't give a good reason why.
Ray marches to the heroic drum,
And though his suit looks kind of dumb,
When we first see him try,
He manages to fly,
And Felicity finally gets some.
So Ollie and Diggle soon dare
To break right into the League's lair.
They soon lose their cover,
But, as we discover,
Ra's really wants Ollie as heir.
The ep sure is one snappy dresser,
But Ollie's dumb choice makes it lesser.
But it takes that hit,
'Cause I'll say this for it,
It's better than its predecessor.
Fearing execution for treason,
Ollie and Thea take a season
To train for a while,
So they go to the isle,
And have to train there for some reason.
To give Oliver back his drive,
Merlyn found Slade still alive,
Let him out for a thrill
To force Ollie to kill,
Which is interesting, if contrived.
But the rain of flashbacks is torrential,
And, as ever, inconsequential,
But as onward they plow,
They still manage somehow
To be more than usually tangential.
It's not like Oliver et al
Have that many plot points to corral,
So all this past action
Is just a distraction
From Slade's little Battle Royale.
There are big reveals to mull,
But of stuff we know, so it's null,
And somehow, in spite
Of flashed-back-to fights,
It just ends up terribly dull.
Now, wrapping up all of Brick's feats,
We cling to the edge of our seats,
As our ragtag crew
And Malcom Merlyn, too,
Mass for a battle in the streets.
In this ep, Malcom's past is a factor.
He melts down like a nuclear reactor,
Rememb'ring how mommy
Was taken from Tommy,
Portrayed by a dreadful child actor.
Now I've said that flashbacks unfurlin'
Have done little but send me hurlin'
But it's clear as we breeze
Through Malcom's memories,
That we've just traded Ollie's for Merlyn's.
We see his wife's death was the kick,
And how he became such a dick,
Eventually brought
Back to the main plot
By a hasty retcon about Brick.
Oliver, once his injuries free him,
Returns to have the baddies flee him,
And while he's still no fun,
I must say, I for one
Never thought I'd be so glad to see him.
The dialogue tries to throw winks
As it runs through all these hijinks,
But it's mostly just staid,
Frequently cliched,
And never as smart as it thinks.
But the climax is done with such style,
And the last speech brings on such a smile,
How often it halts,
And whatever its faults,
The brawl makes the whole thing worthwhile.
After an intriguing but somewhat underwhelming episode last week, the latest episode of Arrow tells a much larger and more compelling story, marred only by one nagging flaw that I will come to later.
The best stuff first. The overarching plot with Brick as the new villain had threatened to become like the Slade Wilson mega-arc last season, in which the villain takes an unreasonably and - ultimately - self-defeatingly long time to bring any of his plans to full fruition. Happily, in line with the aggressive persona of this new villain, his take-over-the-slums scheme is refreshingly straightforward, simple, and fast. He kidnaps three city officials and holds the area to ransom, essentially declaring his own fiefdom over The Glades district of the city. Done.
And in point of fact, he wins! With Oliver still gone, the city is left with his entourage to sort everything out in his absence, and their struggle to do so feels very real, very dangerous, and very suspenseful. As it turns out, struggle is much more engaging and relatable when not constantly interrupted by huskily whispered platitudes from a joyless mentor.
But we are by no means free of Oliver in the interim, and this is the nagging problem with the episode that I so crudely hinted at above. Not only are we intermittently assailed by more interminable flashbacks, which have always been the most bloody-mindedly tedious part of the show after the previously on... segments, but we also get a handful of scenes of Oliver recuperating in the present day. These scenes serve the dual purpose of bringing the story to a grinding halt every time they appear and reminding us of similar scenes in The Dark Knight Rises, another superhero tale that took an ill-advised break from building up tension to watch the hero recover from severe injuries sustained in the line of duty.
I am, however, being far too cruel. Midnight City is a very compelling episode that moves the season arc forward but still manages to tell an engaging story of its own in the meantime, which is as succinct a definition of a good TV episode as I can be bothered to think of. There is also a small but satisfying final twist that sets up more intrigue for the future, so well done there as well. It will be interesting to see if the next episode will be able to sustain this high.
Arrow appeared at its mid-season finale to be going in a more interesting direction, having ostensibly killed off its main character. And, to be fair, at the beginning of episode 10 we get a little taste of the sort of show that might have arisen were the series to have stuck to its guns, with the Arrow-family teaming up to fill the void left by their friend and mentor, trying to honor his work while still letting the criminal element of Starling City - and incidentally, the hinted name change to the more source-appropriate Star City cannot come soon enough - know that the Green Arrow never truly left.
What we get instead is a great deal of dreary is-he-dead-or-is-he-not wavering, both from the characters and from the show itself, as it stretches out a disappointing reveal over the full runtime of the episode. Spoilers, I suppose, though anyone who has not figured this out probably does not have much of a future in comics media - Oliver is not dead, and a figure from his past looks set to repay a life-debt to him by nursing him back to life. At the very least, this means that we might have a couple more episodes before Mr. Myfault McHumblebrag makes his inevitable return to the city, allowing us to focus on the more interesting characters in the meantime.
To this end, the oddball work relationship between Ray and Felicity is given a nice wrinkle by the disappearance and presumed death of Oliver, as Felicity tries to work through a grief that Ray has had much longer to adjust to since his own seemingly obligatory personal trauma. That said, Brandon Routh and Emily Bett Rickards have probably the two most compelling characters on the show and remain perhaps its two most engaging screen presences, to the point where if the show was announced to be retooled entirely around them it might have a chance of surpassing The Flash as best DC show on the air right now.
Despite all this negativity, I am interested to see where the show is going with all of this, particularly with the introduction of new supervillain mastermind Brick, played by Vinnie Jones doing his best impression of Vinnie Jones. As with The Flash, Arrow is taking advantage of a lull after a mid-season blowout to pick up its plot threads in preparation for a spirited dash for whatever end-goal it has in mind. That, in my view, is reason enough to keep watching for a spell.
