Arrow: The Undertaking

For those so interested, I recently did an overview of Arrow’s first season for my friend Helen’s blog, so please check it out!

Hey, remember Walter? Moira’s husband? Oliver and Thea’s stepfather? Don’t worry if you didn’t, because everyone else forgot about him too. But since the season finale is coming up, it’s time to remember him again!

Oddly enough, I don’t have a huge amount to say about this episode. Although everything was build-up towards locating Walter and freeing him from captivity, there’s little in the way of forward momentum beyond Merlyn mentioning that a particular device from Unidac Industries is on its way to Starling City.

Other than that, a fair portion of the episode’s runtime is taken up with flashbacks – not to the island, but to the pre-accident period in which Malcolm first introduces his idea of the Undertaking to his fellow co-conspirators.

It never fails to amuse me how television attempts to signify a shift back in time, and Arrow went for the tried-and-true techniques of different hairstyles, different lighting, and the presence of dead characters. Of course, the most important element of any flashback is to be found in the acting, and both Stephen Amell and Susanna Thompson got the chance to play a different, earlier interpretation of their characters. But where Amell went for comedy with a reminder of how callow Oliver once was, Thompson’s Moira is quite poignant in how genuinely calm and happy she appears to be.

But as it happens, I’m not particularly enlightened as to how Moira got involved in the Undertaking. She was obviously against it when Robert first mentioned it to her, and yet at this point it’s apparent that she knew Merlyn was behind the sinking of the Queen’s Gambit and Robert’s death (he tells her: “I’m sorry I had to take him away from you”). So what on earth happened between the sinking of the Gambit – which as far as she was concerned, took her son away from her as well as her husband – and becoming Merlyn’s right-hand woman?

The more I think about it, the more irritated I am that the flashbacks chose to focus on Robert’s motivation rather than Moira’s. Whatever may have been going through Robert's head is now fairly irrelevant to the story at hand considering he's been dead for over five years. Yet Moira has been quietly manipulating things behind-the-scenes for the duration of this season. Surely it was her that deserved the focus of the flashbacks.

Miscellaneous Observations:

It was a nice little sequence with Felicity at the underground casino; but you wonder why they bothered considering Oliver ended up bursting in and simply demanding the requisite information.

The Oliver/Laurel/Tommy love triangle considers to bore, especially since the show was forced to remind us that Oliver was cheating with Laurel’s sister onboard the Queen’s Gambit – which included calling her to not join him on the docks until after Laurel had left.

Felicity and Laurel come face-to-face for the first time – and let’s hope it’s not the last. Though I think they’re trying to make a running gag out of people not knowing who on earth Felicity Smoake is.

Stephen Amell might not win any awards for his acting ability, but that moment of barely controlled rage at the hospital before he turned around to face Merlyn was great.