Arrow: “Taken” Review

She has a very particular set of skills.

Oliver Queen may have been in a happy place when this fourth season of Arrow began, but he reached another low point this week. His son was kidnapped by a villain that Ollie has repeatedly failed to take down over the past few months. That same villain used the kidnapping as leverage to force Ollie’s political career to a premature end. The revelation that he has a son in the first place was enough to put Ollie’s relationship with Felicity on the rocks. All of this brought a new wave of darkness into Ollie’s world. Strangely, though, the conflict in this episode never quite hit home as hard as it should.

It’s hard to pin down exactly what went wrong this week, except to say that the drama wasn’t quite as intense as you’d expect given the circumstances. Ollie’s situation was as desperate as it’s been since the peak of his feud with Ra’s al Ghul last year, but that desperation never fully came across on screen. With a title like “Taken,” you expect the episode to be all about Ollie going nuclear on Star City’s criminal element, pounding skulls until he finally tracks down his missing child. At no point did Ollie unleash his inner Liam Neeson.

In that sense, maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to bring Vixen into the fold this week. Ollie’s decision to “fight magic with magic” was clever, and probably the first smart play he’s made re: Damien Darhk all season. But it definitely diminished the sense of danger and tension having a powerhouse like Vixen backing up Team Arrow. In a literal sense, she did all the heavy lifting this week. Bad for Team Arrow, good for her, I suppose.

It was definitely cool to see Vixen make her live-action Arrow universe debut. Even cooler was the fact that Megalyn E.K. reprised her role from the animated Vixen web series. It’s pretty rare that an actor is qualified to both voice a superhero and portray them in live-action. And even when they are, it’s rarer still that they’re actually given the opportunity. I’ll be forever bitter that no one has had the good sense to cast CCH Pounder as a live-action Amanda Waller.

Anyhoo, E.K. proved she has the chops to play Vixen in any medium. Her gruff, no-nonsense demeanor made her a solid foil to Ollie and the rest of Team Arrow. It didn’t hurt that she was given plenty of quality action hero lines, especially the “How about I kick your ass like a woman?” one-liner that marked her debut. This episode also did a fine job of adapting the character from animation to live-action. Obviously this show is a bit more limited in terms of how her powers are portrayed, but we still got to see her fly and summon super-strength. If this episode didn’t necessarily leave me desperate for a Vixen spinoff series, I do hope she continues to play a recurring role in the Flash/Arrow universe.

She will find you, and she will kill you.

This episode also benefited from a heavy dose of Damien Darhk. Neal McDonough brought his usual magnetic charm as he tormented Ollie. Rarely has Darhk seemed so gleefully evil as when he confronted Ollie and Felicity in the parking garage and made light of the fact that he had tried to kill them both.

It was surprising to see just how far this episode went in terms of moving forward the conflict between Team Arrow and Darhk. Not only did they finally deduce the source of his power, they managed to destroy it and leave Darhk helpless. That raises the question of just what role the villain is supposed to play in the remainder of the season. Is the destruction of his totem a temporary setback, or is he now going to recede to the background while the rest of his Project Genesis cronies emerge from the shadows? It would have been nice to see some follow-up to Darhk’s battle with Ollie. One would assume from the fact that the police showed up that Darhk was arrested for kidnapping William. What does this mean for Ollie’s torpedoed mayoral campaign? The teaser for the next episode shows Darhk behind bars, but this episode had a distinct lack of closure on that front.

Even if the hunt for William never felt as dramatic or fraught with peril as it could, it did allow for some solid character drama for Ollie. Our hero took a real beating this week as he was forced to reveal the truth about William to Felicity and also to choose between remaining in his son’s life or sparing him from the danger that would ensue. It was interesting to see Mari and Diggle positioned as the sort of angel and devil on Ollie’s shoulders. Ultimately, Ollie sided with Mari and chose to sacrifice fatherhood for the greater good. Even if William or Samantha never factor into the show again, that sacrifice is something that will continue to weigh on Ollie.

And it seems “Olicity” has come to an end as well. The two might have broken up on better terms than they did during the Flash crossover, but the end result was more or less the same. Felicity simply couldn’t reconcile the thought of her husband-to-be keeping such a huge secret from her. And can you blame her? This episode reached a fittingly tragic conclusion when Felicity regained the use of her legs only to walk out on Ollie instead of walking down the aisle with him.

That twist lends an interesting new wrinkle to this image that Marc Guggenheim tweeted this week:

That image may not be a hallucination, but it’s definitely fishy. Either there’s hope for Olicity yet, or something weird is brewing in Star City.