Arrow: Unthinkable

I made it, I finally made it! Season two of Arrow is in the bag. I started watching back in October 2014, which is much longer than I thought it would be, and certainly not at the same pace as weekly viewers.  

As a season finale, this was pretty much what I expected. All the main characters are given a moment of heroism, a bevy of guest stars brought in to assist or hinder, the overarching themes wrapped up, the villains defeated, and the hooks established for next season.

To kill or not to kill: that is the question of this episode.

Diggle and Lyla

I had to laugh at the fact that Lyla – a popular but by no means beloved supporting character – ends up getting the most badass scene of the entire episode: leaning out the side of a helicopter and blowing up a clock tower full of mirakuru soldiers with a rocket launcher. Five seconds in, and no one can hope to top that!

It also illustrates that Amanda Waller's plan to raze Starling City in an attempt to destroy Slade's soldiers is completely bonkers. Obviously these guys can be taken down with significant but restrained firepower (or even just an arrow to the neck à la Malcolm in the last episode) making ARGUS more of a threat than anything Slade can come up with.

As such, Diggle and Lyla head to ARGUS headquarters to put a halt to Amanda's drone strike, calling in the help of the Suicide Squad – or at least one of them – to help them do it. Deadshot's role was fairly inconsequential, and felt a bit like an attempt to enlist as many supporting characters as possible for that "grand finale" feel, but it also helps to underline the moral ambiguity of what everyone is trying to achieve.

Amanda and Slade are two sides of the same coin: both completely convinced of their own righteousness, though Amanda at least is in possession of pragmatism born of reason. Once the threat has been quashed, she stands down – but not before revealing that Lyla is pregnant in a bombshell moment that's almost hilariously irrelevant in comparison to everything else that's going on.

And wait... did Lyla know that Oliver Queen was the Arrow? Because it wasn't treated as any sort of surprise when she walked into the Arrow Cave with the others. (Seriously, I've no memory of whether this has been covered in previous episodes).

Roy and Thea

The mirakuru cure kicks in just as Slade's men attack the clock tower, and it's soon apparent that Roy no longer has his preternatural strength. You'd think this would make him a liability in the battle that commences, but Oliver still insists on making him part of the strike-team – even gifting him with an eye-mask and all the symbolism that goes with it.

Honestly I think they dropped the ball a little on the post-reveal Oliver/Roy relationship. The lead-up to Roy discovering the Arrow's identity has been one of my favourite slow-burning subplots of this season, and their subsequent mentor/student bond not without potential. When you think about it, Roy is now to Oliver what he once was to Slade, and their interactions loaded with the sense that Oliver is afraid his young mirakuru-injected padawan will go down a similarly dark path.

Yet after joining the team Roy (and his training) was put on the backburner, and I feel he's been a bit short-changed as a result.

A lot of his material has involved the inevitable "do I choose my girlfriend or the fight?" issue that all superhero vigilantes have to grapple with, and it's a question that has the same answer every single time. They always chose the fight, and even when they don't, fate finds a way to force them into it. That's what makes them heroes, and that's what has made the raising of the "girlfriend or fight?" question a tiresome cliché in the superhero genre.

Which puts Thea in the unenviable "girlfriend" category. After being lied to by every single member of her family and her boyfriend, she rightfully decides she's had enough of their bullshit and makes the sensible decision to go make a life for herself far away.

That's Malcolm and Roy's cue to track her down and further mess with her head. She's pushed so far that she actually shoots her biological father at point-blank range in an attempt to free herself from him, and is thwarted only by his body armour (always go for the head kids!)

John Barrowman was probably going for "menacing" here,
but for some reason this scene is actually kinda funny.

In a response that pretty much vindicates her shooting him in the first place, Malcolm compares her conduct favourably to Tommy, lauding her for having the conviction to pull the trigger. A well-timed phone call from Roy gets her out of this creep's orbit, but Malcolm leaves her with the promise that everyone will keep up their lying and secret-keeping. It sucks because he's right.

Roy and Thea make plans to leave the city together, but the Fight (I feel it should be capitalized) makes its call and in Roy's absence Thea finds his arrow-themed weapons. That's enough for her to throw in the towel and join her father.

It's frustrating because we the audience know she's making the wrong decision, and that the show will almost certainly punish her for it. In the world of superheroes, female characters are seldom allowed to be upset with their boyfriends for going out every night to fight crime, much less get furious over the consistent lies and deception they're fed.

So ignoring the fact Thea could have easily made a home with Walter or Laurel, why wouldn't she go with her father? She's tired and vulnerable and grief-stricken, and it's easy to understand how her circumstances lead her straight to the back of Malcolm's limo and his waiting smirk.

Quentin and Laurel

Our two second-favourite members of the Lance family didn't get much to do this episode: after an inspiring and only half-incoherent speech from Quentin, his only contribution is to magically appear in the tunnel to kill one of Slade's soldiers (and save Nyssa's life in the process).

Meanwhile, Laurel gets knocked unconscious and left on the precinct floor in a bid to keep her safe, only to wake up and get promptly kidnapped by one of Slade's men. I don't know how much Kate Cassidy is getting paid for this gig, but it's not enough.

Sara and Nyssa

Sara calls in Nyssa to help out Team Arrow against Slade's men, in exchange for her promise that she'll return to the League (after all the effort it took her to get free?) It immediately causes tension between Oliver – who wants to solve this with as little bloodshed as possible – and the core tenets of the League: to get the job done whatever the cost.

It results in Nyssa unhesitatingly snapping Isabel's neck while she's unarmed and on her knees – a shocking but rather anti-climactic end for that character that serves mostly to make a point: that Nyssa can't be trusted in the face of Oliver's attempt to minimize the loss of human life.

And as much as I would like to, I still can't warm to Sara/Nyssa. After giving Heir to the Demon a rather lukewarm review, it was brought to my attention that the portrayal of canonical gay couples are held to a much higher standard than straight ones, which makes me want to go easy on some of the dodgier elements of their relationship – but the whole "kidnapping your mother in an attempt to coerce you into returning to me" is still a pretty big hurdle to jump.

Oliver and Slade

When it all comes down to it, this episode was about these two, and how Slade's vendetta endangered Oliver's "no killing" policy – as well as his growth into a persona that could justifiably be called the Arrow instead of the Hood or the vigilante.

Oliver wants to end all of this non-lethally (though it's somewhat amusing that this declaration segues straight into the scene of Thea shooting Malcolm in the chest) but he can't get close enough to Slade to inject him with the cure.

He grapples with a shoulder angel and devil over the course of the episode: Quentin advocating him to forego his policy in the face of overwhelming violence and destruction, and Felicity giving him the inspiration he needs to outthink Slade (or as she puts it, making Slade outthink himself).

So it comes down to two separate showdowns: Slade's soldiers versus Team Arrow in the underpass, and Oliver versus Slade on the rooftop. The former is a pretty cool fight scene, where the mirakuru soldiers actually come across as truly scary for the first time (when they turn and charge in unison) and the staged as yet another female character hostage crisis – but with a twist.

Superhero stories are so reliant on Distressed Damsels that I'm pretty sure these writers don't even notice how many times they've put Sara, Laurel and Felicity into the Standard Female Grab Area, but this time at least they decide to subvert it a little. Having realized that Slade has bugged Queen Mansion, Oliver takes Felicity there and declares his love, knowing that Slade will overhear them and take her hostage.

It was a pretty big gamble to take with Felicity's life – what if Slade just killed her instantly? – but it paid off when she waits till he's distracted and stabs him with the cure.

(Though one thing I don't understand is why Slade has been so uninterested in Sara all this time. I mean, she's the one that Professor Ivo spared, presumably because Ollie chose her over Shado. If Slade was out to kill the woman Oliver loved, Sara should have been at the top of his hit list according to what Slade knows about their history together. The fact that he doesn't go after her suggests – what? That Oliver's love life is so mercurial that Slade can believe a brand new woman he's never heard of before could now be the great love of Ollie's life?)

Why have one love interest taken hostage when you can have TWO?

The flashbacks and the contemporary timeline are intercut in a pretty ingenious way, with Slade/Oliver fighting in the freighter and on a Starling City rooftop, both times with Oliver facing a choice on how to end the conflict: end Slade's life or administer the cure.

Symbolism!

For the past two seasons we've been watching the development of Oliver/Slade's relationship, and though there's a heavy dose of the whole Xavier/Magneto "friends become enemies" deal, this episode also points out another element: the Batman/Joker quality of each creating the other (at least in the Tim Burton movie). To be frank, I don't think the friends-to-enemies arc had the pathos it could have done, based as it was on a love triangle, a fridged woman, a brain-melting enhancement drug and a contrivance that wasn't actually Ollie's fault in any conceivable way, but the idea that Slade was such a fundamental stepping stone on Oliver's road to "becoming someone else" works a lot better.

We've been watching the origins of the Arrow unfold across two distinct plotlines: the flashbacks tracking Oliver's growth into the vigilante killer we see at the start of season one, and the contemporary timeline exploring how he becomes a masked superhero. It makes sense that the definitive moments that solidify these dual identities would revolve around the man who taught him how to survive, fight and kill.

Obviously this was much better as actual footage.

The first time around, Oliver kills Slade by driving an arrow into his eye. The second time, he spares him – first in making sure he's given the mirakuru cure, and then by incarcerating him in an underground cell on Lian Yu. It's a pretty clear-cut demonstration of how Oliver has grown as a person...

BUT (you knew this was coming)

The problem with what the show is trying to tell us – specifically that killing is bad and you're a hero if you refrain from doing so – is the disconnect that's always apparent in these types of shows: that life is sacred, yet killing bad guys is supercool. It usually translates to nameless, faceless Mooks being killed off left, right and centre, but any character with a place in the opening credits getting spared because it's "the right thing to do."

Case in point: Lyla swooping in on a helicopter and blowing up a tower full of Slade's soldiers is treated as a triumphant, kickass moment – but what makes those soldiers any different from Slade? Matter of fact, what makes Lyla any different from Oliver?

And if you apply cold logic to the situation, this crisis in Starling City didn't come about because Oliver didn't show mercy to Slade on the freighter, but because he failed to actually kill him. Slade survived the arrow to his eyeball, so it wasn't Oliver's lack of mercy that caused all this, but his lack of competence. (Plus who's to say even if Oliver had given him the cure, Slade wouldn't have gone ahead with his vendetta anyway?)

By the end, we're left with the sight of Slade in an isolated underground cell on the island, and I can't help but feel that a Mercy Kill would have been preferable to this Cruel Mercy. As Oliver says, Slade has nothing to look forward to but a lifetime in Purgatory, and if I were in his shoes I would have opted for a clean death given that I hate being underground in enclosed spaces!

Basically, I get what the writers are trying to tell me, I really do. But it's all muddled up with the show's overall treatment of death (the lives of named villains are held in sacrosanct, though Oliver planned to bury all the other soldiers in rubble after declaring: "they're not men, not anymore"), and the fact that the reason all this happened is arguably not because Oliver didn't show Slade mercy, but that he didn't kill him properly when he had the chance.

Just for the fun of it, imagine this scenario playing out in reverse: Oliver shows Slade mercy on the freighter, only for Slade to go ahead with his Roaring Rampage of Revenge, leading to Oliver being forced to kill him in such a way that not only saves lives but releases him from his drug-addled agony. I'm not saying this should have been how it played out, only that it could have been an equally valid plot – were it not for the fact that Oliver's development into the Arrow is bound up in refusing to take lives...

...except when they're nameless mooks. This will probably always be my biggest bugbear not just of this show, but of practically every superhero story in existence: that human life is treated as precious and worthless depending on the importance of the characters involved. It's an uneasy collision of Doylist sensibilities (that wants to depict the hero blowing up bad guys) and Watsonian ones (that in the "real world" of the story, you can't have your characters kill without cause or consequence).

In Conclusion...

Sara is swept away into the ocean in the flashbacks, which is an inevitable but rather odd coda for her character (throughout most of the island narrative she's very much felt like the Hero of Another Story) and in the present day gets on a boat with Nyssa after stating that for the first time ever she's in charge of her own destiny (which sounds fake considering it was part of the deal to enlist Nyssa's help, but okay).

Before she goes she gives Laurel her leather jacket – no doubt foreshadowing Laurel's future role as the Black Canary – but Quentin and Laurel are only a few steps away from the dock (the ship hasn't even cast off yet) when Quentin collapses with a serious injury. He ... didn't notice that before? And don't say that adrenaline kept him upright, because there was plenty of downtime between the saving of the city and the goodbyes with Sara.

Thea heads off with her father, a decision that's clearly telegraphed as her first step to the Dark Side by those black leather pants.

And in our final twist, we learn that Oliver didn't spend five years on the island. There have been hints peppered throughout this season that he has a history with Amanda Waller, and that's confirmed when we see him wake up post-freighter in Hong Kong.

You can't mistake those heels.

So that was season two of Arrow. It's taken me long enough to get through it, but on the whole it's been an entertaining ride. I've been a casual viewer for the most part – not hugely invested in any one character, and certainly not a shipper in any way, shape or form, and it's been fun just chugging along episode-by-episode.

It may take me a while to get around to season three, partly because I've heard it's not very good, and partly because I'm experiencing some superhero fatigue – but intriguing GIF sets keep popping up on my dash, so I'm sure I'll reach it eventually.