I was left somewhat confused by this week’s flashbacks though as unless I’ve completely missed the plot, Kovar IS NOT a member of the Bratva but is instead one of their enemies. Oliver was tricked into joining the Bratva, thinking he could rises through the ranks and get to the man, but instead he now has the entire Bratva at his back as he prepares for a gang war. This confusion is just another example of the flashbacks being underdeveloped despite the fact that they’ve been a staple of the show since the first episode and every episode since. All confusion aside though, it was great to finally kick off this season’s main stories in both the flashbacks and the modern day.
After the five episode pre-amble setting the board for a confrontation with this season’s villain Prometheus, the game is well and truly afoot after the Green Arrow and Spartan are deliberately led to a message set alight for our heroes to find, “SO IT BEGINS.”
So it appeared as though Prometheus was a good old fashioned serial killer, going after random people such as a cab driver or a divorced mother of two with no rhyme nor reason as to why he was picking these targets, leaving the SCPD and Team Arrow at a loss as to how to stop him. Things were made worse when news of these serial killings was leaked to the press with Oliver’s sort of worst enemy yet also his “potential friend with benefits”, reporter Susan Williams being more than happy to blow the story causing a city wide panic in the name of good ratings.
This lead to one of the weirdest sequences I think I’ve ever seen in ARROW. Weird for reasons I’ll get to in just a second, but one that was commendable nonetheless. After a panic at an outdoor market fair sets off a handful of people shooting wildly into the night after they thought they saw the so called “Throwing Star Killer” (and as a Brit, the whole gun thing adds a whole other layer to the scene I’m not prepared to go into here) Team Arrow scrambled to stop the shooters before innocent people got hurt. Seeing the team work together to save innocent bystanders from the ensuing chaos was great, but the aforementioned weirdness came about due to something that’s been bugging me since Prometheus first showed up. His costume looks too much like the Green Arrow’s. I get that he’s obviously meant to fall into that category of “evil version of the hero” but if these shooter’s believed they saw the throwing star killer, would they not be forgiven for going even crazier once another hooded character firing off sharp projectiles showed up? Ragman too is guilty is this. These characters are completely too similar. But on that point, did the shooters even know what the “Throwing Star Killer” looked like or did they just see someone holding something they presumed was a throwing star? This scene felt like it should have led to an escalation as if I can’t necessarily tell the difference between the Green Arrow, Prometheus and Ragman from a distance, how are the people of Star City, who’ve never seen them up close?
After plugging the names of Prometheus’s victims into the Arrow Computer, the team discovered that their names were anagrams of people from Oliver’s list, all the way back from season one. Stephen Amell said over the summer he was excited at the prospect of a villain who was created as a result of the events of a past season and it looks as though this is what he was hinting at; Oliver’s past is coming to haunt him. The new recruits had a hard time dealing with the fact that season one Oliver had a straight up hit-list, killing people on the regular, especially Artemis/Evelyn, pointing out Oliver’s hypocrisy at having stopped her from killing to exact revenge for her parent’s deaths. Of course these trust issues led her to try confronting Prometheus by herself when the team split up to stake out the small group of people whose names matched the dark archer’s pattern for picking victims. She managed to hold her own for a while, proving Prometheus can in fact bleed when she cut into his arm, but eventually had to be saved by Oliver. Small side note, yay for the parachute arrow escape from a moving train! Oliver and Evelyn worked out their differences leaving me to believe either Ragman or Mr Terrific will be the focus next week, as it seems we’re getting to delve into the backstories of the recruits one at a time. I’m rooting for a Curtis episode.
A sub-plot with Felicity having to lie to her cop boyfriend Billy and stealing one of the aforementioned throwing stars from his desk led her to confessing the truth; that she works with the Green Arrow. Taking the news exceptionally well just fed my suspicions that Billy is the prime suspect for being the man behind Prometheus’s mask. The revelation that the stars were made from the melted down arrows that “The Hood” used in season one, meaning Prometheus not only has a connection to the list but access to SCPD evidence in lock up, just made me all the more sure (though it could still be the new pretty boy D.A. who’s playing a kind of pre Two-Face Harvey Dent).
So ARROW writers? The “twist” at the end of the episode, with Deputy Mayor Lance, who evidently never actually quit drinking this whole time, waking up in his apartment with a cut on his arm where Artemis injured Prometheus AND bloody throwing star on his coffee table no less, fooled precisely no one. You’ll have to do better than that.
Written by Nick Whitney, ARROW Beat Writer -- Click to read Nick's posts
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