ARROW Season 6×18, “Fundamentals” recap

24 Apr

Welcome back, Arrowheads! You could understand how stressed Oliver Queen has been this season: he’s been a vigilante, also a mayor, and now a husband and father. Juggling all that can’t be easy, what with his teammates all leaving in disgust. But add to that Ricardo Diaz’s machinations to take over the city internally, that FBI investigation, and now the move for Ollie’s impeachment from office, it wouldn’t be a stretch to see how he might feel like everything’s going wrong. Well, it’s gonna get worse.The Gap. Before we see how Ollie walks into a police station at night in his old Hood getup to take down Diaz, we have to look back to the start of the day. At Arrow HQ, Felicity is letting Ollie know about an unusual gap in the surveillance cameras at the police station, and Ollie surmises Diaz might be meeting his crooked associates there. Before he can finish explaining how this might be he opportunity to take Diaz down and Felicity explains how that could be a monstrous mistake, Diggle shows up. He was brought their under false pretense by Felicity in hopes to repair the bond between these two buddies. No such luck, but at least Diggle is considering a new job at ARGUS in the meanwhile.

Ollie goes to the mayor’s office where he talks to councilman Kullens (you remember him? The jerkoff councilman from last season?) about his impeachment hearing later in the day. Kullens assures Ollie he’ll be given the opportunity to present cause for that firing of the corrupt police captain and D.A. at the hearing, and shakes his hand. Nothing odd there. Ollie knows they don’t have much evidence, so he sees Felicity at their loft. Before he leaves to take William to a school science fair, Felicity says she has proof that can show Diaz was buying out those corrupt officials, but the problem is that only someone with a lot of investigate power–like say, the Green Arrow–could have complied this evidence. This would only make the FBI case on him even worse, and he…violently flings William’s science fair thing is across the room? He’s not sure why he did that either, but Felicity just calmly tells Ollie to go for now, while she tries to talk with William. That’s not normal, is it?

“Wow, I haven’t needed to do too much work to screw up Oliver Queen! I’m kind of awesome!”

Tap Tap Tap. Ollie goes back to the HQ to calm down, but he’s annoyed by some kind of tapping noise. He sees Felicity there, and she is worried about Ollie, so much so that she suggests they spend time away from each other for a while. He’s flabbergasted by this, so he calls Quentin to come over and talk. Quentin tries to reassure Ollie that things are just tough right now and just stay the course and ride it out, but Ollie just can’t shake the feeling everything is upside down right now and it’s all his fault.

While Quentin leaves to go prep for the impeachment hearing in a few hours, Ollie is still at the HQ, and that annoying tapping noise is still in the place. Ollie follows it to the elevator, where he finds…Adrian Chase aka Prometheus, somehow alive! WHAT?! Adrian starts taunting Ollie about not being sure he was dead (to be fair, when you see a guy lose most of his brains to a self-inflicted gunshot wound, do you need to be sure?), and starts fighting Ollie. Ollie gets Adrian into a headlock, and decides to just snap Adrian’s neck. That seems like it, except he leaves Adrian’s body there in the middle of the HQ, and then, the body is gone! Adrian is next to him, still taunting him, and Ollie starts putting the puzzle together. “I’m hallucinating”, Ollie says. Not yet.

The Worst Fear. Ollie gives himself a blood test and confirms it: he got dosed with Vertigo! He puts it together that Kullens probably had it laced into his hand when they shook hands, meaning he works for Diaz too. Meantime, he gets a call from Quentin about showing up for the impeachment hearing, and has to bring up the whole being drugged thing. That Adrian Chase hallucination isn’t helping things either, needling Ollie about how all this work from Diaz has wounded him. Then he gets to float through a few hallucinations of our Laurel, the Team Arrow noobs, all grilling him about his decisions.

Ollie comes to, and tries to compose himself long enough so he can get to the impeachment hearing. Then he sees himself, dressed as the Hood again, telling him he’s failed his mission by attaching himself to so many people, and them bailing on him. It’s like head Adrian says, that Ollie’s greatest enemy has always been himself.

Well at least he hasn’t hallucinated about season three. Then he really would be in hell.

The Devils On My Shoulder. Ollie somehow doesn’t hallucinate himself into a telephone pole and arrives for his hearing, still high on Vertigo. He knows there’s no other choice but to play the evidence, but Kullens brings up what Ollie feared would happen: that the Green Arrow is probably the only person who could get that, and either Ollie knows him or IS him. Quentin makes up some family emergency excuse to get Ollie out of the room, and tells him he’ll try to delay the hearing for later, but in the meantime, Ollie needs to sleep off the Vertigo. That Adrian hallucination tells Ollie there is one solution to this: you know where Diaz is secretly meeting, so go to the police station and kill him!

Even high on Vertigo, Ollie knows that’s impossible odds to fight through alone. Well, them’s the breaks, to paraphrase head Adrian. Meantime, Felicity has just brought second place science fair winner William home, and she gets a little ping on her laptop. The little tracker she put on Ollie’s bow is showing him heading to the police station. She calls Quentin and finds out about the Vertigo dosing, so both of them run off to stop Ollie, who is now in his classic Hood costume.

The Mission Comes First. Quentin gets to the police station just as Ollie is about to go inside. Ollie knocks Quentin out, and Felicity arrives after a run over from her loft (!) to find a wrecked lobby. She spots Ollie ready to head into the room where Diaz is meeting his associates (of course, we know Diaz is only there with a lot of heavily armed corrupt cops waiting for Ollie to pop in), and tries to talk him down. He tells her about her wanting to leave him, which is confusing only because she spent the day with William, and now it’s obvious that visit was a Vertigo hallucination. She asks Ollie to trust his heart, not his head, and not to do this attack. He decides to listen and follow her out, just as Diaz gets irritated enough to just order his goons out to attack. Joke’s on them, because those two are gone!

The classic “swing away with the wife from a batch of heavily armed corrupt cops” routine to spice up the marriage!

Hangover. At the HQ, Quentin and Felicity are tending to Ollie as the last of the Vertigo gets out of his system. That might be the only good news so far, because news has come in that Ollie just got impeached from being mayor! That also makes Quentin the mayor now! Ollie’s good with that for now, because he realizes from that Vertigo experience that he needs to scale back everything in order to figure out how to fix things. That of course means not relying on Felicity as Overwatch for now, and maybe spending time away from his family! That seems like an idea rife with problems.

At the police station, Evil Laurel visits Diaz, who is surprised the Vertigo dosing of Ollie has worked out better than expected. Mind you, his systematic destruction of Ollie is not done yet, but until that comes to its end, he’s going to let crime bosses know that Star City is “open for business”! We’ll see what all this talk from Ollie and Diaz means next time!

–Comic book connections: Ollie was mayor of Star City in the comics, but he resigned to secure his legacy after it was revealed he was secretly funding the superhero group The Outsiders.

–Odd parallel that Diaz says the same thing about “not making a martyr of Oliver Queen” in the Vertigo hallucination and in the final scene.

–I know Tommy Merlyn is not supposed to appear in this season until later, but there is a missed opportunity by not having him show up in Ollie’s Vertigo haze.

–You know, maybe no need for guilt for not visiting Rene in the hospital, Ollie. His noobs did shun visits from everyone else. Screw them, anyway.

–We get a mention of Samanda Watson as someone who could help them stop Diaz. That doesn’t pan out, apparently.

–“Why haven’t you quit?” “I was promised a raise.”

–“Drugs are bad.”

–“Your husband packs a punch.”

–“For my high school science project, all I did was hack Napster.” “What’s ‘Napster’?”

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