ARROW Season 8×09, “Green Arrow and The Canaries” recap

24 Jan

Welcome back from the break, Arrowheads! So in case you didn’t know from not watching Crisis on Infinite Earths (and also, why didn’t you?), Oliver Queen is dead. He died protecting the multiverse, and came back again to die (again), giving birth to a new Earth. A lot of things have changed (if you’ve been watching the other Arrowverse shows, you know it’s been quite a bit), but what about what happened to Ollie’s kids, Mia and William? What about their future, now that it’s already been radically changed already before Crisis?

The New Future. It’s Star City 2040, and it’s been pretty quiet for the twenty years since Oliver Queen died. In that time, Mia has grown up to be an educated socialite, engaged to be married to Diggle’s son, JJ (!), and William, Zoe, and Connor are relatively okay. Before we get to them properly, we have the arrival of Evil Laurel in town, thanks to time travel, who is looking to find another socialite, Bianca Bertinelli (the daughter of Huntress, Helena Bertinelli), before she’s kidnapped. She doesn’t get there in time to save Bianca, so she looks up one possible ally: Dinah Drake, who for some reason, has been dumped in the future after Ollie’s funeral, and erased from the timeline? We don’t dwell on that long before we learn Evil Laurel discovered Bianca’s kidnapping was the flashpoint for a descent into chaos for the future of Star City. They got three days before Bianca’s found dead, but they clearly need some more help, and Evil Laurel knows exactly who to bring in.

That statue has lasted longer than the Black Canary statue of Laurel Lance, you know.

Refresher Course. At a big gala dinner for her college graduation, Mia is celebrating her engagement when Evil Laurel and Dinah drop by to ask for her help. Mia doesn’t remember much about her life as a vigilante or her meeting her dad before and during Crisis, so Evil Laurel turns on a little device (thank Cisco for replicating some of that Martian power of memory recall J’onn has) that zaps all that info back into her head. She faints for a second, but suffice to say when she wakes up, she’s alarmed by JJ (as you remember, she watched him murder Zoe in another timeline), and tries to play it all off as partying too hard. Later, she talks to Dinah and Evil Laurel at Dinah’s place, and seems unconvinced she can be helpful as a hero, but agrees to help our duo find Bianca.

The plan is to have Mia just ask the Bertinelli family what happened to Bianca, while Evil Laurel and Dinah bug the Bertinelli house for surveillance. After an afternoon of waiting, they learn Logan Bertinelli is moving something rather suspiciously out of town. The trio suit up (well, not Mia, because she doesn’t feel comfortable wearing that Green Arrow suit her dad gave her) and intercept Logan, only to find that suspicious package isn’t Bianca, but some green substance. Before we linger on what is going on, a bomb blows up the van containing that mystery chemical. And in the distance, our heroines spot disappearing into the night…Deathstroke?

A Familiar Mask. The trio reconvenes and consider who could be this Deathstroke, and JJ seems the likely suspect. Mia does not believe her fiancé could be responsible for the kidnapping, alternate timeline notwithstanding, but helps Dinah and Evil Laurel sneak into his offices to find out if he is or not. Unfortunately, Mia is caught by JJ as she’s hacking into his personal files, and he reveals the only secret he’s hiding is his plans for their future honeymoon. Oh, and it seems Bianca sent an Instagram post saying she was on vacation on a tropical island, so that’s awkward.

“Hey, ladies.”

The timing of that post from Bianca seems suspicious, and that leads to some heated talk between Mia and Evil Laurel over those suspicions about JJ. Mia tries to do some damage control over this mix-up, but JJ thinks it’s better they have some time apart for now. After that blowout, Evil Laurel visits Mia and convinces her that maybe she can be a hero for the city just like her father. Bianca’s post is finally decrypted and it’s staged to look like she was in an island, instead of where she really is, in a building specific and unoccupied in town. So yeah, time to suit up.

The Girl Behind The Cowl. Our trio get to the building, and because of some meta dampeners, have to go in and fight their way in and out. They find Bianca, and find who is wearing the Deathstroke mask, and it’s…Bianca’s jilted ex-boyfriend Trevor? Sure, okay. Anyhoo, they fight their way with Bianca to the roof, and Trevor opens up some gas pipes to blow the place up. He mentions something about “her” not being stopped (along with a look at a suspicious tattoo on his wrist), before he lights up the building. Mia pulls out some cable wire arrows and the trio and Bianca slide down the cables away from the exploding building.

The Future Ahead. Our ladies celebrate saving Bianca, but realize they can’t completely give up on crimefighting, thanks to hearing of this unknown threat behind Trevor’s kidnapping plan. So while Mia is patching up things with JJ, Dinah and Evil Laurel discuss the future, like making Dinah’s place a HQ for the Canaries. We also learn there’s another reason Evil Laurel wanted to bring Mia in: a future headline that puts Mia in the center of all of this danger. At a memorial statue for Green Arrow, Mia and William chat about this new Green Arrow, and Mia realizes something about that tattoo Trevor had: its the markings of the hozen arrowhead that was passed on through the Queen clan from Ollie to Mia to William! Before she can say it, both Queen kids are knocked out by tranquilizer darts, and William is taken away by masked men! At JJ’s place, he’s subdued by a mystery person who uses one of those memory restorer things to bring back JJ’s memories of being Deathstroke!

Green Arrow and the Canaries: has better spinoff launching odds than Wildoggin’ Out.

And…well, unless we somehow get a solution to all of that in the final episode coming up next time, I guess we have to wait and see if the spinoff gets picked up or not. Fingers crossed.

–Series connections: no major ones this time, but let’s ponder who this mystery threat could be to Star City’s future (just in case that spinoff doesn’t take off after this little backdoor pilot). Clearly it’s someone connected to the Queen clan, and those numbers are only limited to the Queen kids, and…Thea? Not Emiko, I would imagine, since she’s dead. But who knows with the world after Crisis. Maybe the finale will shed some light on this.

–So Connor got the bum rap in this timeline change, being a bit on the skids. On the other hand, Zoe hasn’t been impaled. Take the good with the bad, I say.

–That sarcastic group “Awww” when thinking Trevor was just acting like a jealous boyfriend in kidnapping Bianca was sweet.

–Dinah can sing? That’s a news flash we all didn’t expect.

–Drinky saucy snippy Evil Laurel is the best, huh?

–“Thank God for morons.”

–“And also he never graduated college, so I assume he’d be very impressed.”

–“Who are you bitches?”

–“You know, I can get used to all this free alcohol.”

That’s it for now, but come back next week for the final Arrow recap, the series finale, “Fadeout”…