ARROW Season 7×05, “The Demon” recap

16 Nov

Welcome back, Arrowheads! Last time, Oliver Queen got himself transferred to Level Two of Slabside to find “The Demon”, who may know something on Ricardo Diaz. Instead, he got some serious head shrinkage from the doctor running the place, Parker, which can only be bad, right? Meanwhile, Felicity and Evil Laurel have managed to put a tracer on The Silencer, in the hope she will lead them to Diaz. Also, Diggle and Curtis are becoming aware of some shady stuff going on at ARGUS, behind Lyla’s back, no less. No flashforwards to cover right now, so with that, let’s get to the recap…

Ollie Through The Looking Glass. After being cleared by Dr. Parker, Ollie is allowed to mingle with the population in Level Two, albeit with a little shock wristband in case he gets out of line. He notices the thug who attacked him in the season premiere, and asks the main guard if he can get a phone call. That guard tells him he has no phone or visiting privileges while down in Level Two, which is a big uh-oh. It’s only luck that when Felicity is coming to visit and gets that news from a guard, that Stanley is there in the waiting room to talk to someone else (actually, a little too conveniently, if you ask me), and he flags Felicity down to let her know where Ollie is. With that tracer on The Silencer going dark, this gives her and Evil Laurel something to do. And what they find is there’s no Level Two listed to Slabside Prison. Huh.

“Shouldn’t we be trying to kill each other now?”, said by any of these women right now.

Back on Level Two, Ollie finally gets the chance to chat with that thug, who is staying very quiet, more out of fear. When that thug snaps, that shock bracelet lights up, and the guards tell him he’s going back to “the room” for therapy. That doesn’t sound good at all. Later that night, someone sneaks into Ollie’s cell and after a brief scuffle we discover its…Talia al Ghul! Yep, she’s “The Demon”! She looks a little scarred up, probably because she barely escaped that explosion on Lian Yu at the end of season five, and ended up in Level Two. She wants to escape this place because she thinks something evil is going on here, but Ollie is really not interested in that at all. He may be changing his mind though, because the next day, he sees the corpse of that thug being wheeled out in a stretcher from “the room”!

Terrific Cover. At ARGUS, Diggle is told about a new assignment to catch a terrorist, Malcolm Byrd, attempting to purchase biological weapons from a doctor. Only thing is ARGUS already has the doctor in custody and so someone needs to replace the doctor, which should be easy since both doctor and terrorist haven’t had a face to face meeting. Enter Curtis being ordered to go undercover as the doctor, who is not too keen on taking the job. But Diggle assures him it should go without a major hitch. Well, Byrd is not there at the meet, but will meet the doctor at a nightclub tomorrow night to finish the exchange personally. Curtis was under the impression this was a one and done deal, and when he returns to Diggle, he almost flips out and wants to not continue with the mission. He has some unresolved stuff with what happened during his time as a vigilante that he wanted to walk away from, but Diggle convinces Curtis to stay on for the next meet.

The Demon Of My Enemy Is… After seeing that dead thug being dragged out, Ollie talks to Talia about escaping. But first, he needs to find evidence of what’s going on in “the room”, so he can stop whatever is going on in Level Two. She reluctantly agrees, and Ollie decides to test the waters by requesting a meet with Dr. Parker about him maybe relapsing into his old habits. Ollie doesn’t directly ask about what happened to the dead thug, but he can tell the doctor is not going to talk about it, and maybe Ollie shouldn’t bring it up again, if you get his meaning.

While we got that going on, Felicity and Evil Laurel get Dinah’s help in checking out the old files on Slabside and Dr. Parker. What they find is that Dr. Parker was involved in an electroshock therapy that curbed violent tendencies, but at the cost of the patient being left a brainless mess. Uh-oh. Which brings us to Ollie and Talia staging a fight against each other, to get shocked by those bracelets, and taken to “the room” for therapy.

“It takes brass balls to be a mad doctor! And mine fly around and fire lasers!”

Encore Performance. Curtis arrives at the nightclub with an actual vial of the chemical agent (you know, to make it real), and meets Byrd face to face. It seems like a normal exchange of money for biological weapons until Byrd brings out an explosive device to house the chemical in. Turns out Byrd was going to set up the doctor for a chemical attack on the very nightclub they are in! Whatever shakiness Curtis had about getting back to fighting in the field disappears as he takes down Byrd and his goon before they can launch this deadly plan. Later at ARGUS headquarters, Curtis takes Diggle aside and notes something he swiped from Byrd’s little tablet meant to arm the explosive device. It’s an image of a painting from the 19th century with an unnaturally large amount of encryption around it. And when said painting is called “Dante, He Hath Seen Hell”, you know something is not right here.

The Blue Room. At Level Two, Ollie is being strapped into whatever creepy electroshock gizmo Parker has while Talia is forced to watch. Well, Prisoner 4587, ahem, excuse me, OLIVER QUEEN! has enough of this and him and Talia break loose. The doctor is knocked out, and Ollie grabs some data from his tablet with a USB stick before Talia and him start making their way out. They fight their way through some riot guards before hitting where Talia has discovered an escape route: the morgue! There’s a chute that leads to the river outside, but Ollie won’t be going.

He gives Talia the USB stick and asks her to get it to Felicity, so she can reveal what has been going on in Level Two. Ollie is going to stay and serve whatever time he has to serve left, and not become an escaped fugitive. Talia takes off and Ollie holds off the riot guards just long enough for her to escape.

Their motivation for this fight is imagining killing Talia’s dad. Too bad one of them already did. Hey-ho!

Back At One. Thanks to Felicity getting a USB stick left by “someone”, there’s enough information there to shut down Level Two and remove Parker from his office. Unfortunately for Parker, he loses more than his job when Talia decides to pay the doctor an unscheduled personal visit. With Level Two shut down, Ollie is sent back to his old cell in Level One, where Stanley tells him about telling Felicity about what happened to him. She wanted to let Ollie know that she is close to finding Diaz. Great news, yeah?

Also, that tracker on Silencer pings back to life, but the signal is coming from Moscow. Well, why is she there? Because Diaz is there, paying his own unscheduled personal visit to…Anatoly! Considering Anatoly betrayed Diaz, this won’t go well, I think.

–Comic book connections: Talia mentions being caught by “an old foe in Gotham”, which can mean only one thing: Robin. No, just kidding, it’s Batman. We will be visiting Gotham in the big Arrowverse crossover in a few weeks, but with a different Bat-person there.

–Speaking of that crossover, have you seen the promos for it yet? Looks like Ollie and Barry Allen are going to be having awkward moments there.

–Hey, it’s a hallway fight! Man, we need to put the kibosh on that for a while, even though this one was particularly good.

–Felicity asks Evil Laurel if she wants to have a pizza related dinner. Well, it’s awkward for both of them.

–Pretty sure you can’t get flagged by another inmate for a chat in the visiting room like that. Not from experience, mind you, just from common sense.

–“I’m not sure I need a in-person tutorial on how to watch a blinking light blink.”

–“Getting roped into the sequel was not part of the plan!”

–“Sorry, ’empathy’ is a word I’m learning.”

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