ARROW Season 1 rewatch, Ep. 18, “Salvation” / Ep. 19, “Unfinished Business”

21 Aug

Welcome back to the rewatch, Arrowheads! When last we left things, the Queen clan was getting into one mess after another. Ollie has had to deal with an assassination attempt on Malcolm Merlyn, unknown to him, ordered by Ollie’s mom! And Moira’s plan failed, leaving her to contend with a Malcolm looking for the person behind the attempt on his life. This also revealed to both Ollie and Diggle that the assassin Deadshot is still alive, which is of bad news to the latter man in that duo. Also, Thea is dating some dude named Roy from The Glades, which is odd. She’s doing better on the dating scene than Ollie, whose newest girlfriend has moved out of town to recover from injuries given to her by his murderous ex-girlfriend (long story there). And Tommy is still dating Laurel, so it’s not all bad. Well, maybe not, but let’s find out for ourselves…

Well here’s hoping this Shado lady doesn’t cause a brutal rift between these two that sets of a chain of revenge years in the making. Fingers crossed.

“Salvation”

In this episode’s flashback, Ollie and Slade give out a deal for Fyers: give them a way off the island, and they’ll return the control chip for his missile platform. When both parties arrive at a mutual meeting place (Fyers bringing Yao Fei with him), Fyers makes a counter offer: give him the control chip or they get to watch Yao Fei’s daughter get shot! That daughter, Shado, is resourceful enough to escape, and the quartet of Ollie, Slade, Yao, and Shado run, but when Yao gets shot in the leg, he tells Ollie and Slade to take Shado and run. The trio do, and discover that this was all a ploy by Fyers to distract them while he had troops scour the forest and find where the control chip was hidden. So with no bargaining chip, our heroic duo is back at square one, but Shado does seem to know what the big scheme Fyers is up to.

In the present, a crooked real estate developer has gotten off of a possible manslaughter case involving an apartment building in The Glades, which puts him in the crosshairs of some justice by The Hood. Funny thing, though: when Ollie arrives to deal with this guy, he finds that guy has been kidnapped! Ollie would like to be the exclusive dispenser of violent vigilante justice in Starling City, but since the search for the guy is going to take a while, Diggle takes Ollie to dinner. While there, they get a link from Felicity to a live webcast of their intended quarry, strung up by a mystery assistant, and executed! This is apparently the work of a tech savvy vigilante that used to work in The Glades known as The Savior, and we also learn he’s got a new target: the assistant DA who didn’t file a case against the crooked developer.

The Savior has that assistant DA lined up for execution in a few hours, which leaves little time to find him. Felicity starts tracing the webcast’s signal for where it’s coming from, but everywhere Ollie goes to, the signal moves location. Eventually, the assistant DA is executed, and that leaves Team Arrow struggling to figure out what to do next. They should hurry, because The Savior gets a new victim to execute online: Roy Harper! The Team figures out that The Savior is actually using the shut down subway to move around, so Ollie rushes to that subway car to save Roy. Ollie has to kill The Savior to save Roy, and that experience rattles Ollie enough that he thinks he needs to open up more. Also, he makes a startling connection when he sees the subway patterns: it’s the same pattern on the book his father gave him! The Undertaking has something to do with The Glades, but what, exactly?

Meanwhile, Laurel is seeing her dad and estranged mom doubling down on investigating this lead on whether Sara is alive or not. So she does her own investigating, and reveals to her parents the girl Dinah thinks is Sara is not Sara, and in doing so, discovers Dinah knew about Sara leaving with Ollie on the Queen’s Gambit and never told anyone, and has been driven by the guilt of it. Another rough reckoning of guilt comes as Moira has to be concerned about Malcolm looking into the assassination plot against him that she put into motion. Her way out is to betray her friend with the Triad connections to Malcolm, who dressed as the Dark Archer, kills the guy in front of her! She clearly didn’t expect it to go down like that, but then again, what was she expecting?

Watching a shirtless scarred guy do lifts above her head: the best part of Felicity’s day.

–Comic book connections: Shado is another character lifted from the DCU, although she was occasionally a villain in some of her appearances.

–Dinah tells us she lives in Central City, a place that should be familiar to viewers later on in the series, and of course, The Flash.

–I can’t imagine Oliver Queen parkouring around the city in broad daylight wasn’t the least bit suspicious for people walking around.

–“It’s just – you went over there to get all ‘Grr, stop being bad or I’ll arrow you’.”

–“I don’t want to be on an island anymore.”

At least its none of that “wax on, wax off” crap.

“Unfinished Business”

Our flashbacks this time take us back to the plane wreck, as we find Shado to be quite the sparring partner. Ollie is interested in a bow, but is warned against using it, as he doesn’t have the strength to use it yet. So Shado does a little exercise with him where he has to slap a bowl of water over and over again, and through that, builds up enough strength in the hand to pull back the bow. Now all he needs to learn is how to fire an arrow.

Back in the present, a random party girl at Verdant walls into traffic and gets killed. Quentin stops by because he learns the girl ingested Vertigo and may have gotten the drugs there. Tommy and Ollie think that’s not the case, and certainly are concerned that Vertigo is back on the streets since The Count is still locked up in an asylum after his overdose drove him nuts. Actually I meant “was“, because not long after the visit to the asylum by Quentin and The Hood, we find out The Count has escaped! Oopsie.

Quentin is not sure about Tommy’s innocence in Vertigo coming out of his club, so after looking into it, does find one peculiarity: a payment is unaccounted for in the club books. We learn later that Tommy simply bribed off an public official behind Ollie’s back to speed up the opening of Verdant, but Quentin still wants to examine all of the club…even the basement. But when he gets down there, he finds no sign of anything that could be mistaken for the lair of The Hood. That whole bribe thing makes things a bit chilly between Ollie and Tommy, and that’s on top of Diggle being upset with Ollie that they aren’t hunting down Deadshot. Friends, am I right?

Ollie realizes that they can’t find The Count on the streets, so what if he didn’t escape, but is in fact, still in the asylum? His suspicion is correct, and he finds the doctor in charge of handling The Count had synthesized Vertigo from the Count’s blood (hey, Ollie pumped quite a bit into him). Before Ollie can ask why this doctor has taken on this odd after hours drug making practice, he gets jumped on, knocked up with Vertigo, and the doctor learns who The Hood is. Diggle shows up in time to save Ollie, and Ollie manages in his delirious Vertigo state to put a fatal arrow into the doctor. As for The Count, he’s tied up and still loony from that Vertigo OD.

Afterwards, Ollie offers to help Diggle finally hunt down Deadshot, which is a better outcome than what happens regarding Tommy. Tommy is so fed up with Ollie’s hypocrisy on The Hood and his own bribery thing, he quits the club and gets a job with…Malcolm Merlyn! Oh dammit, Tommy!

“Well I got three arrows: one for each of you.”

–Comic book connections: A good book to recommend on the Green Arrow origin is Green Arrow: Year One, which takes its own not too dissimilar approach to Oliver Queen’s transformation into a hero.

–This is the first appearance of Diggle’s (then) ex-wife, Lyla, in this episode.

–Apparently The Count is a big fan of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, since he quotes lines from the movie at one point. We won’t see him again until season two, when he’s a bit more lucid.

–In the flashbacks, we learn Shado went to the island to find her father, and thinks Yao Fei may be important to Fyers’ big plan on the island.

–“What business has a lost and found that has women’s underwear?”

–“Alright, the person of color has successfully purchased your drugs.”

–“You could have just said he was nuts.”

That’s it for now, but come back next week as we rewatch “Home Invasion” and “The Undertaking”…