Arrow: Unfinished Business

First of all: d’oh! I’ve only just gotten the significance of Verdant as the name of Oliver’s nightclub. It’s another word for green, and an inverted V is like an arrowhead. But isn’t such a blatant in-joke just asking for trouble? Not everyone will be as slow on the uptake as I was.

By now it's clear that this show has a fairly standard (yet effective formula), which is to combine a villain of the week story with a combination of island flashbacks, the Undertaking subplot, and focus on a particular relationship that deepens the characterization of those involved.

That sentence inadvertently ranks these components from “least interesting” to “most interesting”. Still, when done right, the villain of the week plots can be infused with insight into the characters, and this one does.

But I’ll have to get to that after talking about #4 on that list. This episode concentrates on the fallout of Oliver and Tommy’s friendship in the wake of the former’s secret identity being revealed.

After the utter nonsense of Ollie putting together a detox of medicinal herbs from the island in order to reverse the effects of Vertigo, it was a great narrative choice to see him completely fallible when it came to hiding his Arrow Cave from the police. After a girl who looks like she stepped out of the Seventies (That hair? That dress?) gets high on Vertigo and hit by a car, the police investigate the club.

Inspector Lance turns up with a search warrant and demands access to downstairs – and there’s not a damn thing Ollie can do about it. Gig’s up.

But it turns out Tommy has been covering for him; first in bribing an inspector to skip an inspection so that the Arrow Cave isn’t discovered, and then in filling the place with crates and chairs while Inspector Lance is busy getting a search warrant.

As well as confirming my suspicions that putting your secret lair under a popular night-club is a really bad idea, it puts a strain on Tommy who is now a liar to his girlfriend and an accessory to whatever it is Ollie does down there. In a case of Reality Ensues, he quits, not wanting to cover for Ollie and totally disgusted by the idea of a vigilante friend – of course, he then goes to work for his dad which isn’t much better, but it’s not like he knows this yet.

But Tommy’s complete bewilderment and disgust at Ollie’s activities are like a dash of cold water all over this show. Usually we would be expecting the best friend to jump straight on the vigilante bandwagon, but Tommy’s reaction is much closer to reality (seriously, picture your own best friend – how would you react if you discovered they had killed several people). It’s a great and unexpected dynamic to add to the show, especially since Tommy reiterates for the second time that he’s not upset over Ollie keeping a secret, but that he honestly has no idea who Ollie is anymore.

When he tells him: “you put arrows in people who do illegal things”, we know it’s absolutely true. There are two more dead bodies by the end of this episode, and one of them by Ollie’s hand.

It makes you compare him to Diggle and Felicity, who endorse and help Oliver with what he does. What makes them different from Tommy? Well, Diggle is a soldier for one thing, and he’s much closer to the subject of life/death than Tommy. Conversely, Felicity is much more removed from it, relegated to computer work (though clearly affected by what happened last week with Joseph Falk). But more importantly, both of them are getting something from working with Oliver: for Diggle it’s tracking down Deadshot and for Felicity it’s finding Walter – and I suspect that by the time these two projects are resolved, the two of them will be too invested in Oliver to walk away.

And it’s becoming apparent that Oliver needs them a lot more than they need him. As with a lot of these episodes, the story raises the question of when and where it’s okay to kill – if it ever is.

When a refined version of Vertigo is found on the streets, the Count is the obvious suspect –though he’s stashed away in a mental facility and has apparently lost his mind. Yet when he manages to escape, all bets are off.

Was the Count faking his insanity? I’ll admit, the show had me going there for a while, especially with the assumption that they wouldn’t bring back Seth Gabon just to have him act a stuttering wreck, and that the “twist” to the plot was that the Count never left the hospital in the first place. It was only in the moments before Oliver found him on the gurney that I realized what was really going on.

It’s here that the show’s morality gets a little murky. Up until this point, Oliver has expressed the frustration that he didn’t execute the Count when he had the chance, weighing up the damage that Vertigo has done and deeming it worth the taking of the Count’s life.

When he finally comes face-to-face with the Count, he opts to show mercy (even though you could argue it would have been a mercy kill by that stage). But by this point we know that the Count is not the source of the poison, but the scapegoat – and Oliver goes ahead and kills Doctor Webb without hesitation or remorse.

Of course, part of this was due to Doylistic reasons. Doctor Webb and his orderly made the mistake of looking at The Hood’s face, and that’s death sentence for any one-shot villain who figures out the hero’s secret identity. Meanwhile, Diggle takes out the orderly in what was clearly self-defence.

But still. Those two guys? They dead.

I was going to complain that the ethics of this show are a little screwy, both in the depiction of how Oliver takes lives and how other characters do (basically it’s justified if The Hood or Diggle kills someone, but unacceptable when the likes of Merlyn, Helena or Joseph Falk do it), but then I realized – perhaps the ethics aren’t supposed to be consistent. Sometimes Ollie will kill, sometimes he’ll show mercy. The taking of a life is never a truly good or even a justified thing – but sometimes it happens anyway. But I’ll be keeping a close eye on the context of each one, as there’s nothing that’s more irritating to me than when a story asks me to condone something in its heroes that I’m meant to criticize in its villains (cough*Merlin*cough).

In short, another many-stranded episode that felt better put-together than last week. If you’re going to have a number of parallel storylines, then balance is the key.

Miscellaneous Observations:

Nice bit of dialogue between Tommy/Oliver in which the former refers to “the vigilante” in third-person, and Oliver (rather defiantly) replies: “I did.” Great way of getting across each one’s attitude toward the current Elephant in the Room.

Hang on, Diggle and Carly are a couple now? When did that happen? And Diggle is personally hunting down Deadshot without Oliver’s knowledge? Um, aren’t they going to cross-examine this behaviour against the moral high-ground that he took against Helena and Joseph Falk? After all, they were also going in search of retribution for a loved one’s death. Obviously, Diggle has yet to hurt any innocent people, but the fact he’s keeping his search from Ollie means that he doesn’t feel it’s all above-board.

Tommy may have paid off one inspector, but aren't inspections regular events? Another one will turn up sooner or later.

What was up with the scene at the docks? The drug-dealer hands out a bunch of pills to some homeless guys, we’re led to believe that the Count is waiting in the guy, Ollie shows up and shoots an arrow... and then the car blows up?? And then no one ever mentions it again? What the heck??

Over at the aquarium, a woman has this to say to the druggie: “Congratulations, you’re officially the creepiest person I’ve ever met.” No woman on this earth, especially not one by herself, would EVER say something like this. If we see a guy acting creepy, we get the hell away from him.

How could Oliver check the dead druggie’s pulse whilst wearing leather gloves?

“Clear.” Heh. I knew that was coming.