ARROW Season 8×06, “Reset” recap

28 Nov

Welcome back, Arrowheads! Oliver Queen is juggling quite a bit these days, with his grown up kids from the future in the present, preparing for a universe ending event, running errands for the mysterious Monitor, and figuring out a way to fight said Monitor in case it turns out it is the bad guy in this whole thing. Well now he can add one more problem to his list of problems: Diggle’s wife, Lyla, also working with the Monitor! Before Ollie, Diggle, and Evil Laurel can get answers from Lyla on that, they get hit with tranquilizer darts! Now what?

Explosive Fundraiser. Ollie wakes up in his loft, then Mia, William, and Connor come in after a dinner run, reminding him he has to go to a fundraiser. He’s just trying to figure how he went from that rooftop confrontation with Lyla to back home, but hey, he goes to the fundraiser anyway. And there he finds Diggle, who seems to know something happened, but talked to Lyla and found it was all good? As weird as that is, it’s not as weird as Ollie’s meeting with the mayor…Quentin Lance? The deceased Quentin Lance, who seems to have survived his fatal shooting? So, yeah things are definitely not normal right now.

“Oh man! I had the worst dream! I dreamt I was in the worst part of season six all over again!”

There’s an alert of an hostage situation at the police station, and the mercenaries there will only talk to mayor Quentin. While Quentin talks with the mercs, while Ollie sneaks around taking them out. When it seems the threat is neutralized, the lead merc says directly to Ollie that this won’t stop unless you, Oliver Queen, stop it. Then the merc detonates a large bomb, and…

Explosive Fundraiser…Again. Ollie wakes up (again) in his loft, then Mia, William, and Connor come in after a dinner run, reminding him he has to go to a fundraiser. He realizes he’s caught in a time loop of some sort, possibly by the Monitor or by Lyla, and surprisingly when he tells Quentin this, he gets an agreement on that. So when that hostage situation happens again, he tells Quentin to not go in, then arrives to find Evil Laurel there, aware of this time loop. When they can’t disarm the bomb, they agree to meet at the fundraiser when the time loop resets.

They do meet up, and Evil Laurel is thrown off by seeing Quentin alive again. While the hostage situation goes down again, Ollie and Evil Laurel take down the mercs and disarm the bomb. The problem is afterwards, because after realizing the time loop hasn’t reset, then they wonder what is happening. Then, Quentin gets killed by a sniper’s bullet, and the loop resets again! So now we know what’s causing the loops, but how do they prevent it from happening again?

Save Quentin Lance. So now Ollie and Evil Laurel know that Quentin is the key to this time loop, and maybe knowing who wants him killed might be a clue to who is really behind this. Well, they and Quentin follow some clues to the merc’s hideout, only to find a bomb waiting for them there too. While they’re dazed from the blast, Lyla shows up to remind Ollie only he can stop this before killing Quentin and resetting the time loop again. This time, they head back to the mercs’ hideout, disable the bomb, and find a warehouse where they are meeting.

Another Tuesday, another diving away from an explosion.

Our trio of Ollie, Evil Laurel, and Quentin head to the warehouse to find and fight a LOT of mercs there. In the chaos, Quentin gets fatally shot, and while Ollie holds off the mercs, Evil Laurel gets a chance to say goodbye to her surrogate alternate universe dad. The time loop resets, but Evil Laurel is not there anymore, and Ollie finds himself back in the Bunker with Lyla. She tells Ollie that Evil Laurel got what she needed in saying goodbye to Quentin, and until Ollie gets what he needs from the time loop, he’s stuck there. But what does he need?

Resigned. Ollie goes through the time loop again, going through the same warehouse of mercs with Quentin, possibly over and over again multiple times, but always ending with Quentin being fatally shot. But on the one we come in on, Quentin finally tells Ollie he has to stop this and give in to what will happen. They BOTH aren’t going to survive “this”, and Ollie needs to reconcile that fact. Quentin dies again, and the time loop resets.

This time, we come back to Ollie at the loft, and this time he finally tells his kids and Connor how proud he is of them, as if he’s saying goodbye to them. He then sees Quentin at the fundraiser, and says goodbye to him. He leaves the fundraiser to find Lyla there, telling him he’s free of the time loop. It was all a test (like all of the quests he’s been on this season) to let Ollie see that the Monitor was not lying, and that if Ollie is to succeed, he will likely die doing it. He had to let go and accept that fate, and with that, they both vanish before Lyla tells him he has one final test to do.

Whatever Happens. Ollie and Evil Laurel awaken in a large tent, apparently free of the time loop. They surmise Evil Laurel’s time in the loop was to give her closure on Quentin, a reward for not betraying Ollie and friends. But now, they wonder where they are, and find Diggle, Mia, William, and Connor there too, in some island location. Ollie recognizes where they are: Lian Yu! We’re going back to purgatory for the last episode of Arrow for 2019, and before Crisis on Infinite Earths!

Sniff, goodbye again, Daddy Lance.

–Series connections: this brings up a lot of the effects of season six, namely Quentin’s death, but also how much crap happened to him before that, like losing both daughters, and one technically twice before that one came back.

–If you’re wondering why Diggle isn’t in this episode all that much, it’s probably because he was behind the director’s chair for this one.

–There’s a fun generational gap thing in this, in the older people in this like Quentin thinking this is just like Groundhog Day while Evil Laurel compares this to Edge of Tomorrow.

–Really good one shot as Ollie leads Quentin through that gauntlet of mercs.

–As vague as the Monitor’s reasoning for having Ollie connecting with his grown up kids is (“Time is a gift”, as Lyla tells it), it certainly goes a ways to explain this current plotline.

–Big Belly Burger survives into the 2040’s. Something will last after this show ends, I see.

–“I wore the blues long before this monkey suit.”

–“By the way, I pull off the shorter hair better than you do.”

–“We did it! (Pause) Okay, fine, you did it.”

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