The Green Arrow is out for blood.
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.
It’s interesting how Arrow and The Flash followed such different trajectories this week. The Flash lost some momentum in its mid-season finale thanks to an underwhelming reveal about Zoom, but last night’s episode went a long way towards recapturing that momentum. By comparison, Arrow ended in a good place in its mid-season finale, yet tonight’s episode seemed to go out of its way to slow down the conflict. By the end, “Blood Debts” called into question whether Season 4 has enough meat to sustain the show all the way until May.
This episode opened with a rehash of the flash-forward sequence from the Season 4 premiere, as Oliver Queen and Barry Allen again paid their respects at an unseen gravestone. If the writers were hoping this scene would play up the possibility that Felicity would die from her wounds, it didn’t exactly have that effect. Nothing could have made it more obvious she would survive than such an obvious red herring.
Not that Felicity’s life-or-death struggle didn’t provide some good character drama this week. Ollie was dragged through an emotional gauntlet this week as he grieved over Felicity’s life-or-death battle and channeled his rage into hunting down Damien Darhk. In the process, his quest for revenge threatened to consume him and make him neglect his fiancee in her time of need. It’s a struggle Ollie has dealt with many times over the course of the show – learning how to prioritize his family over his vigilante crusade – and it’s clear he still doesn’t quite have a handle on things.
Throughout the episode, Stephen Amell’s angry, haggard performance illustrated how far Ollie has fallen since the early weeks of Season 4. The calm, almost happy-go-lucky Ollie is all but dead now, replaced by someone much more in line with the tortured hero of past seasons. He acted recklessly and even threatened to put himself on the wrong side of the law again by freeing Lonnie Machin from police custody. It’s a sad but perhaps necessary transition. No doubt the real struggle of this season for Ollie, beyond battling HIVE and dealing with the discovery of his long-lost son, will be to prove to himself that his happiness wasn’t fleeting and that he didn’t damn himself by choosing to come back to Star City. The good news is that he did find some redemption in this episode by saving Darhk’s family even when Darhk targeted his.
Ollie’s character arc served as an effective anchor in this episode even the rest of it struggled and sputtered. For one thing, it was disappointing that Darhk had so little screen time in the wake of his attack on Team Arrow. Instead, the writers apparently thought it necessary to drag Anarky back into the picture. Machin seemed bizarrely out of place in this conflict, coming across mainly as a placeholder to prolong the inevitable showdown between Ollie and Darhk. And when that showdown came, the fact that Ollie saved Dahrk’s family from Machin was used as a ham-fisted way of staving off the real battle. It was hard to buy the idea that Ollie would simply let Darhk walk after what he did to Felicity. Darhk granting his enemy “a few weeks” reprieve came across as arbitrary way of postponing their battle until later in the season.
Anarky is such a bizarre character in general this season. He still shares very little in common with the comic book source material. Between his physical scars, bloodthirsty nature and constant talk of chaos and anarchy, he seems more like the show’s latest attempt to inject a Joker-esque villain into the mix. To be fair, it does seem like the character is undergoing a gradual process of psychological evolution. Perhaps he’ll eventually resurface as a more unique and effective antagonist down the road. But when that happens, Anarky needs to be a villain all his own, and not merely a bit player in the HIVE conflict.
If nothing else, Anarky’s presence allowed for a handful of excellent fight sequences. The character’s martial arts prowess is really something to behold as he flips around and spins his three-section-staff like a kung fu master. It’s always nice to see some stylish hand-to-hand combat alongside the more traditional shoot-outs.
Diggle’s character arc was fairly mixed this week. On one hand, David Ramsey delivered a strong performance as he continued to dig into his character’s troubled relationship with his estranged brother. Diggle hit a low point as he resorted to physically beating his brother for information, followed by an emotional high as he finally broke through the ice. On the other hand, the writing simply wasn’t very effective when it came to justifying Andy’s change of heart. He’s been stone cold and remorseless about his time as a HIVE agent all this time. The implication always seemed to be that either Darhk used his magic to physically prevent captive soldiers from talking or the fear of retaliation was stronger than anything Team Arrow could inspire. And we’re to believe Diggle finally broke through by having a quick heart-to-heart chat with him? That doesn’t fly.
Elsewhere, Thea’s arc was fairly forgettable this week, as it generally has while the writers have explored her dull not-quite-a-romance with Alex and rehashed the “uncontrollable rage” angle from the Roy Harper days. At this point I’m just waiting for the inevitable reveal that Alex is a HIVE plant. The flashbacks were somewhat more entertaining as they continued the trend of moving forward and gave Jimmy Akingbola something to do as Baron Reiter for a change. But with the end result of this week’s flashbacks being that Ollie is now Reiter’s prisoner, it’s easy to picture the storyline losing all its momentum again. Hopefully that’s not the case. And finally, Quentin and Donna injected a welcome bit of comedy into an otherwise mirthless episode. It’s weird to think of the normally dour Quentin as the show’s comedic relief, but you could say Donna is bringing out the best in her new boyfriend.
While this episode certainly had its ups and downs, there were a couple interesting developments that tease what’s to come in the next few months. The final moments returned again to that flash-forward scene, this time showing conclusively that it wasn’t Felicity who died. So who else would inspire such heartache in both Ollie and Barry?
It was hard to tell from that limousine shot, but it appears that Felicity has been permanently paralyzed from her gunshot wound. That’s just one more piece of evidence that she’s being groomed to take the mantle of Oracle in this apparently Batman-less DC Universe. The producers have been mostly mum on that subject in past interviews, but the similarities between Felicity and the pre-New 52 Barbara Gordon are too much to ignore at this point. While you could argue, “Why can’t Felicity just be Felicity?”, it might be fun to see her embrace her role as the tech-savvy assistant to superheroes everywhere. She and Cisco can open a consulting firm.
Arrow stumbled a fair bit as it kicked off the second half of 2016. Despite the previous episode ending on a big cliffhanger, this new installment seemed more preoccupied with working Anarky back into the plot than delivering the Green Arrow/Damien Darhk showdown viewers were expecting. The show seems intent on stalling for time right now, and that doesn’t bode well for the weeks ahead.
