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.
We are now four issues into the Endgame arc, and Scott Snyder continues to do a fantastic job. This review is going to be relatively short, since there is only so much I can say about the issue without giving the kind of spoilers that would defeat the whole purpose of a positive review. As with my review of the latest The Flash episode yesterday, I will add a spoilerific section at the bottom for the benefit of anyone who has read the issue and wants to talk about that.
Suffice it to say, there is some very clever stuff going on here. Almost too clever, as is more or less de rigeur for Scott Snyder Batman stories of late. As with its immediate predecessors, the issue occasionally risks getting bogged down in complex, plot-hole-filling explanations of why exactly we are going to the next place we are going to, or why precisely this chemical will have the effect that it does. I very much appreciate the research that must have gone into these passages, but it does sometimes threaten to bring the whole enterprise to a grinding halt.
That, however, is a minor quibble, and there is much to love about this latest issue of the arc. In fact, I think it is the best issue of the arc since its first one. That first issue, if you will recall, was terrific in the way that it brought the rest of the DC Universe crashing into the insular world of Batman in the most violent way possible, but all of the issues of the arc since have brought back the insularity to enhance the claustrophobia factor. Happily, Scott Snyder finds a way to expand the scope of his story without sacrificing the closed-in feel that has made the arc so scary so far. This will be discussed in more detail below in the spoiler section.
The issue also ends with what might be the best end-of-installment cliffhanger that Snyder has yet written for Batman. Even if I had no other reason to return, that ending would have me coming back for the next issue.
Spoilers--
The idea of tying the rest of the DCU to the story by giving an in-narrative explanation of the immortality of various unkillable characters is absolutely brilliant for the reasons cited above, and the idea that the Joker is one of those infected immortals ties back to the opening narration of the Death of the Family arc, where Batman has to talk himself into remembering that the Joker is a mere man after all. And that final page...Oh, wow, that final page. It conveys how desperate Batman is, suggests several possible ways forward for the installments to follow, and leaves enough mystery to make the reader want to come back. This is a callback done right, a cliffhanger done right, and an issue of a superhero comic done right. Full marks!
