ARROW Season 7×22, “You Have Saved This City” (season finale) recap

14 May

Welcome back for the season finale, Arrowheads! Team Arrow is facing trouble left and right thanks to Emiko’s attempt to destroy the legacy of the Queen family, and by extension, Oliver Queen and company. The police are now hunting them down, and that only gets worse because of a rampage Emiko commits in the police station dressed as the Green Arrow. Ollie wants to stop his mad half-sister, but wants to try to redeem her, not kill her. Speaking of difficult odds, our heroes in the future are about to launch an attack on Galaxy One before they release their Zeta supersoldiers, but find themselves all swarmed by the bad guys! Somehow we will solve all of this drama here, but let’s start with the flashforward…

Tear Down The Wall. Zoe rescues her dad and William, while our heroes at their lair have an unexpected ace in the hole: Connor Hawke dressed as a Zeta soldier. Everyone regroups to learn what is going on with the Zeta soldiers, basically swarm into Star City and eliminate any potential criminal with no remorse. In order to disable the Archer program running the Zeta soldiers’ software, they have to disable its mainframe, literally in the wall separating Star City from The Glades! That whole operation relies on Mia to help upload a virus into the system and literally bring the wall down (it makes sense…), and somehow, she does just that.

With the wall down, it’s clear the City needs new heroes, and it has them in the Queen siblings, Zoe, and Connor. So our old heroes decide its best to leave and take the blame for all these wall destroying shenanigans, let these kids protect the city, while Felicity says its time for her to go and let her kids live a life without her helicopter parenting. But first, the Queen family have to make a stop somewhere, and we’ll get there in a minute.

Everyone get in close for your graduation photo!

Star City’s Most Wanted. We pick up in the present where we left off, as police are swarming our Team, unaware that they aren’t the ones who attacked the station. Well, they don’t waste time escaping and getting back to the Bunker, where they find they got some help waiting: Evil Laurel and Curtis! Now they have to find Emiko, the Ninth Circle, and the Cygnus virus before more people are hurt, and they find a lead at a mysterious emergency call to evacuate a local mall. The Team arrives, and finds another ally willing to help: a paroled Bronze Tiger. It seemed Emiko wanted to get enough people outside the mall to maximize a chemical attack via remote control drones. The drones get stopped, but a lot of people get killed and the Team gets blamed for that too.

The Team meets back at the Bunker, and debate whether Ollie should even bother to try to reach Emiko as opposed to kill her, but it’s Tiger and Evil Laurel who argue if they could be brought back from the dark side, why not Emiko? They start searching the city for her, and discover there are multiple payloads of the virus across the city, far too many for the Team to disarm in time. But they only need to get to one location to disarm them all, and the location is a familiar one: the former home of Palmer Tech, the Queen Consolidated building. Someone is really desperate to make their vengeance obvious, huh?

Back To The Start. The Team arrives at the building to disable the transmitter for the virus, while Ollie goes to fight Emiko. She’s still wrapped up in revenge, but during the fight, Ollie lets her know he wanted vengeance for learning of her involvement in the Queen’s Gambit sinking, which started him on his path as the Green Arrow. Now though, he just wants to save her and fix each other, which might have worked to convince her, until it’s interrupted by some intermediary from the Ninth Circle. Emiko’s revenge spree has gotten the secretive Ninth Circle exposed and the members have decided to oust her as the leader, and the pink slip is a knife into Emiko’s guts!

Thanks to a recovering Sergeant Bingsley, the SCPD arrive to help our Team and friends out with the Ninth Circle goons, and clear up all that stuff the Team was framed for. But they all have to evacuate when they learn bombs have been activated in the building, ready to blow! After a nasty fight where they worked together, Emiko starts succumbing to her injuries, and before she dies, she warns Ollie to get Felicity to somewhere safe because the Ninth Circle will want revenge against Ollie, Felicity, and their baby. With Emiko dead, Ollie gets out of the building just as it blows up.

Man, this season has really all been about meeting at cemeteries, hasn’t it?

The End Of An Era. Later, after the Team has been cleared of all those murder charges, they all meet up to reflect on things. Evil Laurel is off to Earth-2, Curtis is going to get married to his new boyfriend, Roy is leaving to find some atonement for those bloodlust murders from a few episodes back, and Bronze Tiger is considering an offer from ARGUS. But there’s another big change coming for Team Arrow: Ollie and Felicity are leaving Star City, seemingly in good hands with their teammates and friends. Of course, only Diggle knows why they are leaving because of Felicity’s pregnancy and that Ninth Circle threat. The Original Team Arrow of Ollie, Diggle, and Felicity spend a nice quiet last moment in the Bunker reflecting on things before heading off to the new Queen home…that cabin in that forest town we saw episodes back, which just happens to be full of ex-government agents to help keep Ollie and Felicity’s cover.

And…then we have a montage as Ollie and Felicity welcome their new baby daughter, Mia, into the world. The new parents spend time with their infant daughter, enjoying time outside, resting together. Everything’s great, and that’s the end of Arrow.

Not really.

Never Enough Time. Months and months later, Ollie and Felicity are discussing getting joint custody of William now that their life has normalized, when they hear someone at their door. Felicity has no clue who the mystery person is, but Ollie does: it’s the Monitor, the mysterious otherworldly person behind the Elseworlds crossover from earlier this season! He says it’s time for Ollie to fulfill his end of their bargain in that crossover, which we finally learn was to help recruit heroes for this big multiverse “Crisis” that is coming. And even worse, the Monitor lets them know that Ollie is not going to survive this endeavor!

Felicity doesn’t want Ollie to leave them, but Ollie knows he has to in order to save all of them from annihilation. It’s a touching scene of Ollie letting Felicity know that she has made him a better person, and Felicity telling him that they’ll be together after this, no matter what. Ollie says goodbye to baby Mia and leaves with the Monitor. It’s pretty emotional, people. Sniff.

All the feels right now.

So let’s mention the flashforward, as Felicity, Mia, and William visit the family cemetery and Ollie’s grave. She lets them know if she doesn’t see them again, she knows they will be okay, because the Queen siblings have each other to lean on now. Much later, Felicity walks off into a field, where the Monitor is waiting. She says she’s ready to go see Ollie, and he asks if she’s sure, because where they are going, she won’t come back from. She tells the Monitor that she’s waited this long to be reunited for Ollie, and now she’s ready. They both disappear into a portal…and that’s the season!

Soooo, now what? We don’t have many episodes left of the series overall, so what will Arrow look like in its final run? Things with the rest of our Team? Ollie putting together a multiversal superhero strike force? Maybe all future stuff with the Queen siblings (I hope not)? Who knows, but we’ll find out in the Fall.

–Comic book connections: The Monitor is a pivotal character in the classic comic book mini-series Crisis on Infinite Earths, where the multiverse is laid waste by a threat known as the Anti-Monitor. That’s also the name of the big Arrowverse crossover coming out this Fall, which…lines up to where Arrow should be finishing its final season. Hmm.

–You can tell in those last twenty minutes there was some real emotion from the actors popping into those scenes. The last time with Original Team Arrow in the Bunker, Ollie and Felicity’s heartfelt goodbye to each other, that was some real stuff going on there.

–So Felicity is not going to be a regular character in the final season (for obvious reasons now), and I do respect that her future self wasn’t killed or something for dramatic effect, but instead allowed to reunite with Ollie…wherever he went.

–I’m glad the whole fugitive thing was taken care of for our Team, but man did it happen a bit too fast. I almost got whiplash from how fast that resolved itself, let alone the whole Emiko and Ninth Circle stuff.

–So we now got an explanation for that Mark of Four tattoo stuff our Team got in the flashforwards. I seriously forgot all about that.

–“I’m not making a face. ‘This’ is my face.”

–“No one die.”

–“He’s trying to save you, dumbass.”

–“…and it’s bigger than the friggin universe.”

Well, that’s all for now on Arrow, but we’ll be back for the final season (the last 10 episodes of Arrow EVER), starting in about October or so. Until then, take care of yourselves…