ARROW Season 5×21, “Honor Thy Fathers” recap

11 May

Welcome back, Arrowheads! When last we left Team Arrow, they had some problems with their HQ that had to be addressed, namely Adrian locking it down and trapping Ollie and Felicity inside of it! After that got taken care of, they still have to find our big bad of the season, and hopefully sooner than later, if Adrian’s visit to Ollie’s hidden son isn’t enough of a hint. But first…

Set The Stage. Ollie and Anatoly fly to Lian Yu, where Ollie is going to engineer his “return” to public life. While there, they find Slade Wilson’s old Deathstroke mask (which explains the opening of the very first episode), visit Ollie’s makeshift cemetery of dead on the island, and go over the plan. Anatoly will get it so some fishermen are in the area of the island in a few days, and Ollie can signal them to get home. Anatoly leaves, and all that’s left is for Ollie to wait. But suddenly, Ollie’s hit with a tranquilizer dart, and before he passes out, he sees the clearly not dead Konstantin Kovar. So much for kicking back for the next few days…

LootCrate’s new Super Duper Premium Deluxe box subscription program gets off to a creepy start.

A Body in Concrete. Right now, Ollie is arriving at the mayor’s office with Quentin, and they have a lot on the plate. Most of the criminals Adrian was responsible for putting in prison got let out (because you can either be a district attorney or a serial killer, but not both), there’s still no sign of Adrian, and a suspicious crate was just delivered to the office. Ollie forgoes protocol when handling bizarrely large crates like this and opens it to reveal a decomposing skeleton in a block of concrete. Later, the body is identified as a Mr. Goodwin, a businessman who went missing fifteen years ago. Clearly Adrian sent this, but why?

Well it becomes obvious why when Dinah gives Quentin a possible suspect, based on signs of struggle in skin underneath Goodwin’s fingernails, and both of them are very shocked. At the mayor’s office, Thea has come back, and she seems to be a bit better since she took her extended leave. Quentin arrives to tell Ollie that they have a suspect in Goodwin’s murder: it’s Ollie’s dad, Robert Queen! We all knew he was corrupt, but a straight up killer?

Cement Shoes. Ollie wants this thing investigated fast to clear his father, since he knows there’s no way something like this won’t leak to the media. But Thea suggests that maybe it’s not a lie at all, and that he did murder this man. Meantime back at the HQ (finally cleared of all that pesky flammable methane), Felicity and the rest of the Team get a lead on the biggest criminal let out by all those overturned cases, the pain resistant baddie Samson, and Dinah and Curtis go to stake him out. At the mayor’s office, Rene and Quentin chat about a major development in Rene’s custody case: that he has to have a hearing on it. Rene really doesn’t want to drag out those nasty memories of the past again to his daughter, but Quentin pushes him to do it. That should work out fine, then.

Ollie meets up with Diggle outside a building where the cement came from, which was built fifteen years ago by Robert Queen’s construction company. Definitely not a coincidence. The duo goes inside and immediately get trapped in a pit…that starts filling up with liquid cement! Curtis and Dinah have to leave their stakeout and rescue Ollie and Diggle, but hey, with that lead coming to a bust, now they can focus on Samson. It becomes clear Adrian has employed Samson when the chemicals that Samson has stolen are part of that tuberculosis formula that Adrian’s dad was going to release to boost the sales of his TB drugs five years ago. But why dig up Goodwin just to frame Ollie’s dad?

“Jesus, Oliver, that is a lot of graves. And those are the people you didn’t murder.”

A Father’s Sins. At the mayor’s office, Ollie and Thea question an attorney named Coffman, who represented both Ollie’s dad and Adrian’s dad. Coffman confesses that Adrian came to see him, and told him to give Ollie something when he came asking around about their fathers: a USB stick. Thea doesn’t think that’s all Coffman has to give up about Adrian, and she’s right, but we’ll find out more about what she gets from him later. Ollie doesn’t want to look at what’s on it, because that’s exactly what Adrian wants. But Ollie gets called away by Felicity on a possible Samson lead, so clearly Thea will listen to her brother and not look at what’s on that USB drive, yeah?

The Team finds Samson buying one final component for this formula, and after a brief fight, Samson escapes with a decent amount of what he needs. And what it is as Felicity finds out is this formula is a very dangerous one, able to be released into the air if needs be. Ollie head aback to the mayor’s office to find Thea did look at the USB drive, and what she finds is a lost surveillance tape of Robert Queen meeting with Goodwin at that construction site that still wasn’t a building, an argument breaking out, and Goodwin slipping into a vat of cement. So he covered up manslaughter, which is just as bad.

Haunts. Ollie and Thea are rattled by this, maybe not as much if they didn’t know they had such parents. Ollie goes back to the HQ, and watches Robert’s video to him that spurred on this whole crusade. He reveals to Felicity that Robert had made two videos, and one was for Thea. Ollie never gave it to her, because Robert told her to watch after her brother, and Ollie didn’t want to shoulder her with that responsibility. Both Ollie and Felicity see that Adrian wants to destroy the whole point of why Ollie started this, but Felicity reminds him the Green Arrow has made his friends better for him being there. You know, past the injuries, emotional stress, losing loved ones, yeah, he’s improved their lives. And then Felicity tracks down where that aerosol virus is being put together for release, and its: the Robert Queen Applied Sciences building! Way to be obvious, Adrian!

Our Fathers. The Team arrives to find Samson and his goons setting up that aerosol device, and Ollie (back in the Green Arrow garb once again!) leaves that party once Adrian shows up. The Team takes down Samson and disarms the aerosol bomb, which seems real easy. Adrian and Ollie fight, and the former is gloating about how he’s tarnishing the legacy of Ollie’s dad. Well, Ollie lets Adrian in on what he learned from Coffman that Adrian never knew: that Adrian’s dad was about to disown him before he was killed because Adrian was crazy pants! So see, Ollie did you a favor, Adrian. And this seems to weird Adrian out enough that…he surrenders himself? Huh. That’s odd.

That does not look like a man who has been defeated at all.

Step Forwards (and Step Backwards). The Team is back at HQ, and it seems some celebratory beers are in order for stopping both Samson and Adrian. Ollie talks to Thea and gives her the video Robert made for her, and she’s not sure she can even watch it. She does, and it does affect her, leaving Ollie and her to reflect on needing to live their own lives beyond their parents’ twisted past. Also, at Rene’s custody hearing, he does not show up! What?! What are you doing?!!!

So, Ollie holds a press conference where he confirms that his father may have concealed the death of Goodwin, but that despite all of that, Robert Queen sacrificed himself to keep his only son alive so that he could be a better man than his father. And in an ARGUS cell, Adrian watches the press conference…and smiles.

Oh, that’s bad. And hey, what about Talia al Ghul and Evelyn Sharpe? Where are they? And why do I think we’ll find out next week?

–Comic book connections: none this week, but I should point you to a really modern tale on the Green Arrow origin story, Green Arrow: Year One by writer Andy Diggle (no, the REAL Andy Diggle) and artist Jock. Worth a look.

–Thea doesn’t want to suit up for action this episode, but something tells me she’ll be seeing some action before the end of the season.

–Did Renee mean to miss his court date? Do we really think he meant to do that?

–So we see Ollie setting up the Deathstroke mask, which based on the title of the season finale, we’ll be seeing again.

–“He was a bomb defuser in a previous life.”

–“I was terrific!”

–“You never told me there was a bar.”

That’s it for now, but come back next week for the recap of “Missing”…