ARROW Season 1 rewatch, Ep. 6, “Legacies” / Ep. 7, “Muse of Fire”

28 Jun

Welcome back to the rewatch, Arrowheads! Ollie is busy on his big mission to deal with the big criminals in Starling City, little aware that his list of baddies is connected to a big conspiracy that involves his mother. Oh, and that her new hubby Walter has pieced together something about that, he’s taking off indefinitely. So let’s just jump into things…

“Legacies”

This Felicity Smoak person is still appearing? You’d think she’d get past the guest starring credit at this point.

The flashbacks this episode take us back to that cave where Ollie is trapped, and he straight up hallucinates his dead dad, who thinks Ollie should just give up. And Ollie is tempted to take the gun in there to kill himself, except there’s no bullets. But hallucinated daddy Queen tells Ollie he needs to right his wrongs, and Ollie wakes up. Ollie looks at the blank book of his father and notices something odd as he’s about to burn a page to keep warm: the list revealed in invisible ink!

Ollie and Diggle are doing some fighting exercises in the ol’ lair, when Diggle suggests a change of pace from knocking off another name on Ollie’s list. A group of robbers known as the Royal Flush Gang just hit a bank in town, and during their escape, shot an off duty cop and left him in critical condition. Ollie’s thinking more about killing the disease of crime, not curing the symptoms. But Diggle is smart enough to trick him into accepting paying the injured cop’s medical bills, so Ollie decides to put the Royal Flush Gang on his radar. After breaking into the local police station to check out some evidence, he comes up with a suspect: Kyle Reston, who has went off the grid with his father Derek, mother, and brother. It makes sense the Reston clan is the Royal Flush Gang, and as we learn after Ollie denies them money stolen from another robbery, is it them, and they still want one more score before leaving town.

Thanks to help of some research from that Felicity Smoak lady who works in the Queen offices, Ollie discovers Derek was a worker in a Queen factory that Ollie’s dad closed in a way that screwed Derek out of his pension. Well Ollie feels he should give Derek a chance to redeem himself, so he offers the man an apology and a job if he wants it. He doesn’t stake it all on that offer, so he leaves a transceiver on Derek, where he hears about the family pulling the last job. After ditching a fundraiser, Ollie arrives to break up the family’s late night bank robbery. But during the fight, a security guard shoots Derek, and he dies. While the rest of the Reston family is brought to justice, Ollie gets some good news in that the off duty cop surviving his injuries.

It’s a good thing neither of them know what the other is up to, otherwise this would be so awkward a burger dinner.

Meanwhile, on the Queen home front, Moira is feeling a little alone with Walter being out of the country, and bonding with Ollie is difficult with his frequent time away. Well, that’s settled with some alone time at a burger joint, except for the part where she’s part of a conspiracy he’s dedicated to destroying, but, progress. Also, things between Tommy and Laurel are a bit slow, so with some advice from Thea about how to handle a certain girl he’s interested in, offers to hold a fundraiser for Laurel’s legal firm. At that fundraiser, we find out Thea was under the impression Tommy was interested in her (and we’ll talk about how icky in retrospect that is later), and despite having to take a plastered Thea home, Tommy seems to have smoothed things out with Laurel. So, like I said, progress.

–Comic book connections: the Royal Flush Gang was a particular band of baddies in the DCU who were way more flamboyantly dressed than the gang in this episode is.

–So, spoilers if you haven’t gotten this far in Arrow, but knowing what we know about Tommy and Thea, her attempt to make a pass at him is less innocent and now more creepy.

–“I should add ‘Personal Internet Researcher for Oliver Queen’ to my job title. Happily, I mean.”

–“Yeah, he didn’t even have a MySpace account. It was a really dark time.”

–“You can just say ‘thank you’, you know.”

“Muse of Fire”

Oh, Tommy. Oh, oh, Tommy.

There’s no flashbacks this time around, so let’s just get to where we are now. Present day, Ollie is going to see Moira for lunch, and as she’s leaving Queen Consolidated, a person on a motorbike opens fire on them. Moira gets a concussion (better than the other poor businessman who gets killed next to her) and Ollie runs off to pursue the assassin. He loses the attacker, and follows Moira to the hospital, who is allowed to go home, bearing she gets some bed rest to deal with that concussion. Ollie learns from Quentin that it wasn’t Moira who was the target, but the businessman she was talking to, a man connected to local mob boss Frank Bertinelli. So in order to get the assassin, he figures the way to do that is to get close to Bertinelli.

He pays a visit to Bertinelli’s house, meets his assistant Nick, and goes in under the impression he’s doing negotiating for Moira. There, he meets Frank’s daughter, Helena, who Frank offers to take Ollie to dinner to further talk about business while he handles an important meeting. That meeting Frank is going to just happens to be with China White, where he warns them to stop attacking his business associates (which she flat out denies is the Triad), or there might be an all-out mob war, but back to Ollie’s dinner date. Ollie and Helena seem to be really enjoying each other’s company, and we learn she had a fiancé who recently died. Diggle calls Ollie away from this dinner to let him know Nick has been shaking down business under Bertinelli’s protection, and the restaurant he was just at with Helena is probably next on that list. He gets on his Hood and interrupts Nick’s shakedown of the restaurant, but that assassin shows up too, and it’s Helena! Talking to Diggle later on, it’s obvious he has some feelings for Helena, but Dig and Quentin (when he figures out the two have been dating), warn Ollie away from her for different reasons.

On other fronts, Tommy is looking to go further in his relationship with Laurel, and it looks like a nice dinner out will go a ways to do that. But there’s a surprise in his credit cards being cancelled, which lead him to talk to his dad, who is that mystery man Moira keeps talking to, Malcolm Merlyn! Malcolm has cut his son Tommy off completely, which is rough. But Laurel seems super supportive of Tommy during this rough patch, so this should all work out.

I’m sure this will be a long lasting relationship with no complications at all.

Later on, Ollie finds Helena at the grave of her fiancé, and unfortunately for both of them, Nick does too. Nick has them taken away to a warehouse to be questioned, and we learn he’s figured out she’s the assassin targeting the family business. But why did she do this? Because her father had her fiancé killed because he was going to rat Bertinelli out to the FBI. The surprise is that she was the one who was snitching, and her fiancé paid for it. Both Ollie and Helena break out and kill Nick’s men, but Helena kills Nick once learning he’s the gunman who killed her fiancé. After talking to Thea, Ollie feels that maybe he should talk to someone about things.

He goes to Helena’s apartment, and by this point, she’s pieced together he’s the Hood. They both talk about each other’s personal vendettas, and well, they make out. Maybe they can help each other, but…we’ll see about that next time!

–Comic book connections: Helena Bertinelli is also known by her identity as the occasional Batman associate The Huntress in the DCU. We’ll discuss that further in our next installment.

–Walter’s back! For how long though, is the big question.

–I’m not sure how I feel with the reveal Moira’s creepy mystery associate is Tommy’s dad in retrospect. Maybe all the machinations of Malcolm Merlyn over the last five seasons has soured me, but I remember thinking that didn’t need to be built up to be such a reveal.

–“So you brought me dinner to ask me to dinner?”

–“I was crying because I was thinking of a Hallmark commercial, with a sick kitten.”

–“If you hurt her, I’ll break your neck. Just kidding.”

That’s it for now, but come back next time for the recaps of “Vendetta” and “Year’s End”…