ARROW Season 7×16, “Star City 2040” recap

20 Mar

Welcome back, Arrowheads! Putting everything in the present on the back burner this episode, let’s discuss the flashforwards into 2040 so far: grown up William finds a message from Felicity, and through that gets a band of heroes to help find her, mainly Dinah, Roy Harper, and Rene’s grown up daughter Zoe. Eventually he gets the help of Diggle’s adopted kid, Connor Hawke, and…Mia Smoak? Yeah, well Felicity and Ollie had a kid ( or have a kid in the present, you know what I mean) and that kid grows up to be a bit angry. But how did that happen? Can they find Felicity? And what about that plan to destroy Star City? Is Rene, now Mayor of the now thriving Glades, on the side of the bad guys? More on that below…

A Cabin In The Woods. We start in a cabin in the woods, as Felicity is giving birth to Mia, and Ollie is there too. We then see Mia grow up in a montage, primarily getting lessons on fighting from none other than Nyssa! It’s a few years before the flash forwards, and it’s obvious Mia is feeling a little cooped up living so far away from any big city. But Felicity is insistent this isolation is for their own good, despite the whole Green Arrow legend thing. No Ollie around, though, so that’s an eerie sign.

One night, Mia decides to try out her cool bow and quiver in the house (like most teens tend to do), and accidentally pops open a secret compartment in the living room. Inside there’s a few computers with a screensaver of young William and dear ‘ol dad. An alarm goes off, bringing Felicity in, and Mia asks if mom is back doing whatever vigilante stuff she used to do. She confesses she is doing something regarding exposing some kind of corporate crime, but she’s doing it on her own. Mia is just angry because she’s been warned in her trips out of the house how much vigilantes screwed everything up, and rebels by taking off to Star City to see if that’s true. Eventually she becomes Blackstar, pit fighter and hacker girl, and yes, eventually starts looking for her mom when she goes missing. Which brings us to…

Aunt Thea was probably busy this episode.

Off The Wall. We find Mia and William scaling the huge wall between Star City and The Glades, which will take them a while. Meantime, Future Team Arrow is hanging back and trying to locate the bombs in Star City, but since that’s going nowhere, they decide to hit up a contact in the police that Dinah has used before. The cop isn’t willing to give up anything at first, at least until the guy realizes Dinah came with Roy and Zoe. He says Eden Corps is behind the Felicity’s kidnapping and cover-up, which seems a familiar name to our heroes, even more because they’ve been silent in activity for months.

The next day, William and Mia arrive at the coordinates Felicity left in that message to them, and it’s to a corporate headquarters for something called Galaxy One. Instead of sneaking in, William gets Mia to play dress up and use his anonymous businessman identity to literally walk inside in broad daylight. Mia’s cover almost gets blown when both of them have to take a handprint ID, but in comes…Connor Hawke, agent of something called Knightwatch? It seems he’s a government agent, and he gets them through the checkpoint into the building, but it’s just one more thing Mia is upset with Connor lying about.

Blind To Truth. Connor followed them into The Glades, and knows who to look to at as possibly behind this: the CEO, Keven Dale (who happened to be the shady guy Rene talked to a few episodes back, imagine that).All they need to do is get a DNA sample from him so they can go inside later and access the more restricted areas inside, so they arrange a meeting with him. While William distracts Keven (who has an unusual dice sized trinket in his hand), Mia gets a sample of saliva from a coffee mug.That done, our duo reunite with Connor to plan their sneak in into Galaxy One.

At FTA’s lair, they get back to find Rene there, and he’s really disappointed in Zoe being aligned with his former partners in fighting crime. Zoe’s just disappointed because her dad is aligned with bad guy Eden Corps in destroying Star City, even though he claims they are not going to blow up anything until the city is properly evacuated. He’s a bit more surprised to hear Felicity is not dead, and leaves feeling a bit guilty. We’ll see how that turns out. Meanwhile, FTA is going to visit a subsidiary of Eden Corps, which is…

“Okay, y’all hate me. I can see that.”

Coming Together. Our troupe of William, Mia, and Connor use that DNA swab to sneak into a secret area in the building, and disarm a few guards along the way. There, they find Felicity, who is surprised because she meant those coordinates for her former teammates to use, not her kids (real or adopted). You see, the bombs are inside the building, waiting to be moved to locations around Star City. William decides to join Felicity to go disarm the bombs in the building’s sub-basement, but Mia is just not willing to. She’s still wrapped up in why her mom is willing to put herself in danger instead of taking care of her family, and later on, Connor agrees it’s messed up they both have parents who put saving others opposed to their family, but that’s what makes them good.

As William and Felicity make their way to where the bombs are, FTA shows up to help out, and eventually Mia and Connor join them, Mia being talked into helping her mom. They all get to the bomb room, which…is empty. Rene pops by to tell them he knows the bombs have been moved to their designated spots, and that in about an hour, they’ll be set off, without any evacuation orders. It looks like Rene has become a good guy again, but with little time to get to all those spots to disarm all those bombs, the Team has to find another solution.

Masquerade Bomb. The solution the Team comes up with is during a big celebration tonight in The Glades, where Keven has the device that will trigger the bombs. So while our Team sneaks into this outdoor masquerade ball, they scan the crowd to find Keven. Mia does and trails him, discovering that trinket she saw him holding in his office earlier is the trigger. He sends some goons to deal with her, and…they fail miserably. Keven tries to flee, but Mia gets her bow and arrows just in time to put an arrow into that trigger, shutting off the bombs. Good shot!

William: “Say ‘You have failed this city’!” Mia: “Why?” William: “Trust me, it’s awesome!”

The Band Back Together. After the failure to blow up the city, Keven sees Rene and ponders if he had something to do with FTA’s success, but pays it no mind because thanks to this open display of vigilantism, Rene has had to declare the Team fugitives to be brought in dead or alive. And also, Keven has some new system ready to deploy against our heroes. Back at the Team’s lair, everyone is celebrating their victory, but realize they still need to take down Eden Corps so they can’t continue their evil plans for Star City. Mia takes off, and Felicity goes to see her alone.

It’s clear when mother and daughter talk that Felicity just wanted to give her a choice of what to do with her life, instead of maybe following in her parents’ footsteps. The talk seems to patch things over between the two for the moment, but Felicity is not leaving until he deals with the whole Archer program. Mia asks why that is, and we see why Felicity takes the Archer system use so personally: because in the present day, we see her create it! Well, that was fun, but next time, it’s back to the present and more current family matters with the Queen clan and Team Arrow!

–Comic book connections: That helmet Keven shows off looks not unlike the Prometheus helmet in the comics. If you know about Prometheus in that, you know that’s bad news for our future Team.

–So lets see: we know Felicity is alive in 2040, maybe Diggle, but as for Oliver? Not sure. Heck, we don’t even know if Thea is still alive. And apparently no one says anything about Evil Laurel either, which is concerning. The future is dicey, y’all.

–Mia and Connor were a thing, and may still be if she can get past him being a government agent asked by his foster dad to watch over her.

–William is starting to finally get the hang of this hero thing, even coming up with the surprising improvisation of making a pass at Keven in his office to distract him.

–Connor makes a Spider-Man reference with that “great power comes great responsibility” talk to Mia. It’s only the first Spidey reference on these shows, with The Flash doing one afterwards.

–Say what you will about Mia’s attitude issues, at least she’s got the smarts to wear flats or go shoeless into a fight. You can’t do much fighting in pumps.

–I don’t know if these flash forwards are meant to test the waters for a future Arrow spinoff, but…I’m not quite there, despite the effort this episode makes. But my want level is higher, though.

–“‘Server room’? How 2019.”

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