ARROW Season 4×22, “Lost In The Flood” recap

19 May

Welcome back, Arrowheads! When last we left Team Arrow, they were trying to prevent Damien Darhk’s plan for global Armageddon! While they prevented wholesale death, they weren’t able to prevent a small town of thousands from getting vaporized. Bad news, since Darhk has now collected those souls to give him super dark powers now. Meanwhile in Darhk’s suburban ark, Thea just lost another boyfriend, this time at the hands of crazy Speedy super fan Lonnie Machin/Anarky. And Felicity is having to deal with her hacker criminal daddy, Noah, being back in the scene. Oh, and A TOWN IN THE U.S. JUST GOT NUKED. Just saying, we got priorities bigger than family crap.

Tempted by Darkness. In this week’s flashbacks, we go back to Lian Yu to find Ollie and Taiana making their way to the air field with that evil idol. Then she get shot repeatedly by a Reiter goon…and lives. That idol is giving her all kinds of evil powers and thoughts, which is freaking Ollie out. Hell, she kills an injured prisoner just so she has superpower to kill Reiter. Speaking of which, guess who shows for a big showdown we won’t see this episode?

Fallout. Back at that magic nexus under the mayor’s office (and who knew that was in the floor plans of that office?), Ollie and Diggle try to kill Darhk, only to have their bullets and arrows get disintegrated. The two get tossed around, and Darhk leaves while starting a cave collapse, promising to not kill them now, but let the nuclear annihilation do that. While the duo escapes, Felicity and Noah are back at Ollie’s loft, seeing the news on the bombing of Havenrock. It happens Curtis drops by to see her former boss, and of course, learns about her notorious dad. But she has to leave for a minute, leaving the other two tech geniuses to figure out how to permanently stop that Rubicon program.

In that underground ark, Thea is still wrecked by Alex’s death, but still has enough fortitude to try contacting the outside with a cell phone. Malcolm arrives to find her, minus a now disappeared Lonnie, and decides to lock her up. At the Arrow HQ, Quentin tells the arriving Ollie, Dig, and Felicity, “Hey, did you know a city was wiped out?”, before Felicity says she got a call from Thea, and a location for her in downtown Star City. Before the boys can get a chance to grab a power bar and some juice, they go over there to find their comrade.

“We’re not in Kansas anymore, Dig.” “No s**t.”

The Underneath. Thea is being held in one of those creepy houses in this ark, and Malcolm threatens to do something to her he doesn’t want to do. Obviously its not make her kill a friend, because she did that once by his hand, so she says, “whatever, psycho, just do it anyway”. Above ground, Ollie and Dig arrive to find nothing, except a sewer entrance that shouldn’t be there. They go in, and find a secret chamber, which alerts Darhk and Ruve to this unexpected break-in. Ruve heads down to the ark to remind Malcolm about dealing with Lonnie, and Thea’s teammates, and she brings along her daughter to clearly look around. Ollie and Dig get into the ark, and are as creeped out as we are.

They end up out of radio contact with Felicity, who then gets an urgent call from Curtis to get back to the loft. While Quentin goes to raid the Arrow HQ fridge again, Felicity arrives at the loft to find the nature of Curtis’ SOS: Donna has arrived, and her estranged parents are bickering. Just so she can shut both of them up, she tells mom she works for the Green Arrow and really needs to stop the world from ending. Somehow, that works. And good thing it does work, because Darhk has pulled up another problem for the father/daughter hackers to deal with: escaped prisoner/computer genius Cooper Sheldon, the ex-boyfriend Felicity put in jail last season, to get Rubicon back online.

A Simple Stroll In The Suburbs. Ollie and Dig wander through the zombified people inside the ark and split up to search for Thea. Ollie finds her first, takes out her guards, and frees her. But, she is pretending to be captured, because Ollie finds himself swamped by Malcolm and some of his goons. Yep, he drugged Thea with a mind-altering substance. AGAIN. Good thing Diggle shows up to help Ollie escape this little trap. They end up having to run as HIVE men chase them down the suburbs (which is way more awesome than me trying to describe it), and duck into another house. They run into a family in the house, who are made aware by a broadcast by Ruve (apparently HIVE also have TV for the survivors of the upcoming apocalypse too) of Green Arrow’s uninvited appearance in the ark. So now our heroes have to take a family hostage. Way to go.

Meantime at the loft, Felicity is distracted from the snippy banter of her estranged parents by an idea of Curtis. If they can overload Rubicon’s system with too many orders, they can shut it down for good. Interesting idea, and one that has to get used thanks to ol’ Cooper trying to disrupt their network. Felicity gives Curtis the OK to fry Rubicon’s system, and the result is a surge that messes up the HIVE HQ’s grid and puts Cooper out of things for a while. Felicity and Noah are actually having a normal parent/child moment, which throws Donna off a bit. We learn later why when she tells Felicity that it wasn’t Noah that left them years ago, it was the other way around. Donna thought her husband was never going to really change his criminal ways, and decided to leave him and take their daughter with her. Hmm, someone bailing on their significant other because they didn’t believe that person could change. Lucky we don’t have to point out the obvious parallel here, because Curtis does that much later. But back to the ark…

Thea Queen: if you date her, at least make out a living will before you do.

Unpleasantville. Ollie and Dig discover something about the family they have tied up: they are not drugged, but came willingly. They thought the world was doomed, which bothers Ollie because they have a point. With all the metahuman, parallel reality and time travel stuff that happens (and that Star City is a terrifying place to live), it has to make our heroes wonder about their crusade to bring hope back to the city. But before we dwell on that too long, HIVE busts through, and Dig volunteers to stay behind so Ollie can find Thea. Good news is she’s waiting outside for her brother, but the bad news is she’s still drugged up, so we get a nice fight. Ollie pleads with her to resist what has happened, and she does that in time to save Dig from Malcolm.

Before they can get around to killing Malcolm like they should have multiple times ago, another special bulletin comes on, but this one is hosted by Lonnie. He has Ruve and her daughter tied up, and if Darhk doesn’t show up, he’ll kill one of them. And then after that, he’ll just blow up the ark. So Ollie reluctantly has to voluntold Malcolm to get the people inside the ark out immediately. Meanwhile, Team Arrow go to grab Lonnie. And maybe save evil wifey. Okay, maybe the kid only.

Exodus From Genesis. The Team arrives in the main chamber of the ark and confront Lonnie, who tells them if some stray thing hits the wrong thing in this room, the ark will collapse. Well, that ends up happening as they fight Lonnie, who takes the opportunity to fatally stab Ruve. Lonnie escapes, and Ruve begs the Team to save her daughter. Well, who can ignore the wish of an evil woman who tried to destroy and discredit them multiple times? They grab the kid and escape, as do most of the people inside, as the ark collapses, and creates a several block long pit in the middle of Star City. Geez, that’s not gonna help the city’s economic recovery at all.

Darhk has a crippling soul addiction, doesn’t he? Someone should get him into soul addiction counseling STAT!

Burn It All Down. Malcolm returns to HIVE HQ to give Darhk the bad news about Ruve, but doesn’t know about his daughter, who I assume is being sent to the Orphanage of Children Whose Parents Are Villains (I’m sure that place exists). Damien is way upset over this, and Malcolm says they can’t repair Rubicon or find another ark to continue Genesis. Well, he doesn’t care about the ark anymore, but he will take burning the planet in nuclear fire right now.

At the loft, Donna confronts Noah alone, and tells him that he needs to leave, for Felicity’s sake. Just because he helped save the world once, doesn’t mean he won’t go back to try and wrecking it after this, and that betrayal would be too much for their daughter to take. We don’t see what happens next, but Donna comes back inside to tell Felicity that Noah had to leave for awhile. On the plus side, they got an unexpected visitor: Damien Darhk!

So will the season finale end with Damien Darhk being swayed from his need to scorch the earth by Donna’s cooking? No, he’ll probably double down on things, so I guess we’ll get a Oliver/Damien final fight next time!

–Comic book connections: No major ones this week, except for the Damien Darhk of the DCU has no wife and kid.

–And ANOTHER mayor is dead. Star Trek redshirts and Night Vale interns have better mortality rates in their job than being mayor of this city. Also, does this mean what I think we’ll see happen next episode?

–Another awesome fight scene with that foot chase, especially that badass jump, turn, and arrow firing stunt.

–Really? They couldn’t find anyone else to get the people out of the ark and just kill Malcolm instead? Seriously, he’s needed to fill a grave more than Laurel ultimately did this season.

–“Looks like the price of real estate in the Glades has gone up. It’s called gallows humor.”

–“…and you make so much more sense now!”

–“Finally, Electric Boogaloo is awake.”

–“Is he seriously going full ‘Star Trek VI’ on us?”

–“Somebody stick something sharp in my eye!”

That’s it for now, but feel free to comment below and come back next week for the recap of the season finale, “Schism”…