Arrow: The Huntress Returns

She’s baaaaaaack.

Yeah, sorry to start like that. But Helena is, in fact, back and though I can see the writing isn’t as strong as it could be in her depiction, her presence does shake things up in ways that are infinitely more interesting than usual.

I enjoyed Huntress last time she featured on the show (though my heart will always belong to the animated Justice League version, as voiced by Amy Acker) even though there was a rather eye-rolling attempt to link her psychotic streak to jealousy over Oliver’s past with Laurel. Really writers? Really? What could have been a fascinating character study and an examination of what makes Oliver’s vigilantism justified when Helena’s is not ends up getting a soap-opera tarnish that’s as silly as it is unnecessary.

Thankfully that’s kept to a minimum this time around, with only one scene that has Helena tearfully talk about “her feelings” for Oliver. For the most part she’s fixated on the singular goal of patricide. With her father going into protective custody as part of a plea bargain that will have him disappear off the grid, she goes to Oliver for help in tracking him down.

She picks a bad time to return to Starling City. Not only is Oliver going steady with McKenna, but his night club Verdant is opening – and it’s hard to know which of these two ideas are the worst. Naturally his temporary reprieve of happiness is not to last, and he considers what Helena wants to do as murder, not justice.

Yet as it happens, the line between Helena and Oliver is a thin one, and Oliver is torn between helping her under duress, and finishing her off for good. She is, after all, trying to track down a mobster and a murderer, just like him. What exactly is the difference between Oliver threatening (and sometimes killing) the men on his list and Diggle having a similar desire to take down Deadshot (as Oliver astutely points out to him)? According to Diggle, it’s that he wouldn’t harm or blackmail anybody in his attempt to get vengeance/justice.

Fair enough, as Helena has garnered quite a death toll by the end of the episode – so much so that a part of me felt that perhaps Oliver should have just let her kill her father (last seen disappearing into the night) at the safe house so that no one else would have to die on her way to him.

So it is in tactics, not motivation or objective that Oliver and Helena differ, and I like that Oliver visibly struggles to defend both her and his actions as compared to hers, eventually deciding to help her simply because she’s too much of a wild card to leave by herself. That, and the lingering threat of her ability to expose his secret identity, all of which makes her an antagonist with an edge.   

Oh, and in a very Merlin/Nimue twist, Helena furthermore knows how to manipulate Oliver – for he’s the one who taught her the importance of leverage, leading to her threatening both Tommy and Felicity.

Yet it’s important to note that she’s not evil. She may have crossed a line when it comes to her threatening of Tommy/Felicity, but it would have been interesting to see how far she would have gone in the pursuit of her father. Would she have harmed a child? An innocent person? However cruel her treatment of Tommy/Felicity, I never felt that either of them would have died at her hands. Still, it’s a thin line, as demonstrated in the scenes involving Tommy and Oliver.

The latter is getting the cold shoulder from the former, who (and this is important) is not upset that Oliver lied to him about his vigilante activities, but that Oliver is a murderer. It’s a relief to have at least one person on the show who takes death and the taking of it so seriously, and he provides a great counterpoint to Helena who kills so wantonly. Death otherwise feels so cheap in these types of stories, and Tommy helps to ground the proceedings nicely, objecting to Oliver’s activities on moral grounds.

In Laurel land her mother continues to insist that Sara may still be alive – though it’s hard to say why. On the one hand she points out a range of deserted islands in the area that Oliver was found, insisting that Sara could have washed up on them, yet on the other she uncovers a photograph that was apparently taken by a tourist of a girl that looks just like Sara. So, does she think that Sara is on a deserted island or not? If a tourist is snapping pictures of her then why hasn’t she tried to contact her family?

Finally, a lucky coincidence has Thea run into Roy and offer him a job at Verdant that he never shows up for. Um...okay. Aside from the old “save a girl from mugging” routine, there’s not a lot of originality here.

Still, I like that there are storylines involving other burgeoning heroes that are quite removed from Oliver – it’s a lovely slow boil in which we see the origins of Black Canary and Arsenal (I had to look that one up) which are growing independently of Green Arrow and yet still intertwined in his story.

Which unfortunately is not the fate that awaits McKenna Hall. The more I think about it, the more I hate this development. Shot in the stomach? A shattered femur? A year of rehabilitation? I feel like the writers thought she was too likeable to just kill, but too insignificant to keep around. This was a rather awful way to write her out, right down to giving her the “dignity” of breaking up with Oliver so that he doesn’t look like a massive asshole for inadvertently getting her into this mess in the first place.

(Yeah, I know it’s Helena’s bullet that did the damage, but like I said – by this time Helena has taken out so many Mooks in her determination to get to her father that it feels like Oliver trying to thwart her is just making things worse).

It felt like an easy (Doylistically) yet terrible (Watsonian) way of getting rid of McKenna, and she deserved better.

Miscellaneous Observations:

I like Jessica de Gouw as Huntress. I’ve seen a few snotty comments here and there as to her acting ability, but having seen her as sweet and innocent Mina Murray in Dracula, I’m convinced that she has range. Hopefully she’ll be back for season two, as she’s a great spanner in the works when it comes to her knowledge of Oliver’s secret identity and what she can do with that information if so required.

Last week McKenna was stuck with a horrid glob of exposition, this time it’s Helena’s first victim that’s forced to get his tongue around: “I swear, I’d tell you where the FBI is keeping Frank, but after your father and I made his plea deal to testify the feds stopped telling me anything.” Ouch. An actor could choke to death on that line.

Great moment when Helena unexpectedly shows up at Queen Manor. This is a tried-and-true way of unsettling an audience and underscoring how dangerous an antagonist is – have them effortlessly appear in a place of safety.

Another great scene: Helena in the police station, staring at McKenna and Inspector Lance with those cold grey eyes. There’s a real sense that the vigilante’s identity is at risk here, and though she chooses to drop Oliver’s name only to give McKenna a “friendly” warning about Oliver’s tendency to let people down, it’s a surprisingly tense moment.

It’s a moot point, but what would have happened if Helena’s father had been in the van that Oliver had followed? Was the plan that he would have killed him? Or did he have to wait for Helena to catch up?

Oh, and in the island flashbacks Slade and Oliver steal a circuit board from the missile launcher. I’m sure it’ll be important next week, but for now it’s just setup.