ARROW Season 6×22, “The Ties That Bind” recap

13 May

Welcome back, Arrowheads! Ricardo Diaz has been spending his time grabbing control of Star City, while slowly dismantling Oliver’s team. And Ollie’s trial for being the Green Arrow seemed like it would be the deathblow. But thanks to some smart planning from Team Arrow, Ollie gets off! So Diaz decides it’s time to just forget the subtle machinations, and go to straight up bulldozing Team Arrow and everyone around them! Well, we got this and the season finale left, so we kinda had to get here.

Just A Normal Night. Everyone related to Team Arrow (excluding Quentin, who you should not expect any updates as to how he’s doing this episode) seems to be taking the night off and relaxing. Well except Dinah, who’s busy shaking down some criminal about where to find Diaz. Okay here’s the thing: you know you just foiled a psychopath’s plans, and while he’s still out there with the whole city wired into him, you take a night off? I guess it’s obvious that what happens next shouldn’t be a complete shock.

Ollie is busy cooking eggs with Felicity and William at their loft (at night?), when he gets a text from Anatoly. It’s a warning to get out, which comes a second before heavily armed gunmen come in blazing. Ollie manages to knock out the goons, and warn Diggle about this, who is getting a checkup at the hospital with Lyla. They manage to take out their ambushers, as does Rene when Diaz’s goons barge into his apartment, and Dinah puts together she’s been baited out as she takes out her attackers. Curtis is not as lucky, as his time hanging out with his man, Nick, when they get attacked, leaving Nick seriously wounded.

After taking Nick to the hospital to recover and everyones’ kids to a secure ARGUS bunker, Ollie and company meet up at the newbies’ lair. And Felicity, against Ollie’s wishes, joins in too. So Diaz has decided to go after everyone in Ollie’s sphere, and when they cue up surveillance in the Arrow HQ, they find Diaz’s men, trashing and eventually torching the place! Well, that defilement can’t go unanswered!

Oh man! They lost the Arrow bunker! Well at least they can shack up at the newbies’ place.

Mobile Target. While retaliation seems the best mode, even Ollie knows a straight up assault on Diaz wouldn’t fare well. So he decides to reach out to Anatoly for what to do. The two meet secretly and Anatoly agrees: attacking a Quadrant manpower boosted Diaz is a mistake. Later, after Diaz has a heated talk about this brutal attack on Team Arrow by one of the Quadrant (the lady who had dialogue in that one episode they got introduced in), Anatoly returns to suggest staying in his office building would not be a good idea. It might be better to move to say, the police station.

And guess who finds out about when Diaz is heading over there? Team Arrow intercepts that convoy transporting Diaz and attacks it. Diaz flees, ends up in a fight with Curtis (who is still pissed about what happened to Nick), stabs Curtis in the side to escape, and pick up a necklace he has dropped in the chaos. The Team has to leave too when more Quadrant goons arrive. Afterwards at the police station, Diaz accuses Anatoly of setting him up for that ambush, but Anatoly slyly builds an argument that he was betrayed by that lady from the Quadrant. Also, he wants a tech guy to make sure that jewelry, which is a USB drive, has its contents intact.

Special Jewelry. After dropping Curtis off at the hospital to fix that knife injury, the Team try to figure out another approach to get Diaz. Felicity figures out that jewelry Diaz was so desperate to hold onto is a USB stick with all the data and transactions he’s made. Get that, and the Team might chop his organization out at the knees. But being at the police station, any member of Team Arrow going to grab it would be walking into certain death…everyone except Lyla, who has the plus of being a government agent to protect her. But thanks to Felicity, all Lyla would have to do is leave a device in there that would copy the data. Easier said than done.

The Team stakes out the police station while Lyla drives in, with Felicity waiting in the car to monitor the hack. The two briefly talk about maintaining a stable marriage, which, maybe not best to ask the person who divorced Diggle once, Felicity. So, Lyla walks in claiming to needing to see some files, and Felicity starts her hack. Too bad that tech is running his scam of the drive when he sees in real time that the files are being stolen. Lyla decides she needs some help getting out, and Ollie and Diggle cover her. But Felicity, needing the device that is collecting the data, sneaks in and gets it, narrowly avoiding being shot by Diaz.

Split Focus. Back at the newbies’ place, Ollie gets some alone time with Felicity, who he’s not happy with putting in danger like that. But she argues that going it alone like he has for the last few weeks has been a mistake, and that they need to start facing their troubles together. Even Diggle agrees, which, duh-doy. Curtis shows up at the place too, fresh out of getting patched up, and Dinah tells him he needs to rest, not drive himself crazy looking for payback for Diaz injuring Nick. She is speaking from experience, after all.

The helpful tech at the police station figures out how to trace back the data to where Team Arrow is, and Diaz decides to pay them a visit with a lot of guys. That Quadrant lady is not cool with Diaz’s extremely loud attempts at killing the Team, and so Diaz stabs her in the throat! Someone needs to seriously fix that impulse control problem!

Oh dammit!

Together, Not Apart. While Felicity is almost finished hacking the data from Diaz so they can use it, they get alerted to Diaz and a lot of goons swarming on their lair. The Team luckily has a secret escape route that can get to, but Felicity wants to stay behind to get this data decrypted. Ollie stays, along with a trigger to blow the lair up as a last resort, but knows they can’t decrypt the data and get out alive at the same time, so he convinces her to leave it behind. As the Team fights their way out, Ollie and Felicity run into Diaz, who has the drop on them both. So Ollie hits the trigger and blows the place, sending Diaz flying out of their way. The married couple gets out to meet the Team just as they see the lair consumed in flames! That’s a lot of real estate to lose in one night!

Finding Another Way. At ARGUS headquarters that morning, the Team learns that now they have no lairs and no data to show for their labor. Ollie calls William to let him know dad and Felicity are okay, and he agrees they need to work together to solve this. But how do they do that, since they are clearly overpowered, with only limited ARGUS resources to work with? Well, Ollie has one more idea.

At the police headquarters, the remaining Quadrant guys arrive to find out what happened to their other member. Well Diaz answers (along with sprouting a massive face scar from that explosion earlier) that she betrayed him, and is not sure about his other partners. So he murders one guy and then asks for the other living member’s loyalty. So much for the Quadrant, man. I’m sure Anatoly is just happy to still be alive after all that.

Ollie is in an office, describing what Diaz has been doing to Star City and how he’s unable to stop him. And the person he’s telling this to is…Agent Watson from the FBI! She says she’ll help him stop Diaz, but needs two things from Ollie, the first being to admit who he is. So yeah, he tells her he’s the Green Arrow! And the other thing she wants is? Well, I guess that will be answered, along with whatever the hell happened to Evil Laurel and Quentin, in the season finale next time!

“Hey William! Do you want to go to Aruba? Turns out your dad wants to go because its extradition free, but you shouldn’t think that’s why we’re going! Anyway, bye!”

–Comic book connections: Not much here, except this version of Ricardo Diaz in the DCU was meant to have been trained by Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows. Clearly not the case here.

–Lots of Diaz stabbing people in the throat this episode. Let’s hope this isn’t a trend followed for the season finale.

–Dinah using her sonic scream to bounce off the wall to take out the gunmen behind her was a nifty touch.

–Of course Felicity would apologize for hitting that tech guy in the face.

–I guess the salmon ladder is dead…again. Oh well.

–“Salt me, Felicity!”

–“I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. You got something stuck in your throat.”

–“I had him, honey.” “I know you did.”

That’s it for now, but come back next week for the recap of the season finale, “Life Sentence”…