I had hoped Evelyn’s betrayal of Team Arrow was something they would tease out over a longer period of time, but instead she showed her hand this week in siding with Prometheus when The Team cornered him, revealing it had all been a set up to mess with Oliver’s head. Any doubt I had about this angle was assuaged however as the winter finale’s confrontation didn’t bring an end to the Prometheus/Artemis team-up storyline and by extension, the story of Evelyn’s betrayal. Instead, in how they handled it this episode, it became the most compelling thing I’d seen on ARROW in its five years.
The mystery of who Prometheus really is seemed to race toward its inevitable conclusion, but with the added brilliance of rooting the mystery in the past of the show itself. Having the flashbacks be to season 1 instead of the typical “five years in hell” was a stroke of genius as we were taken back to an unseen mission undertaken by The Hood back in his first year as a crusader for justice. Diggle prophetically warned him that the path he had set himself on my lead to terrible consequences and of course, he turned out to be right. After attacking Curtis outside Oliver’s Mayoral Christmas Party, Prometheus left traces of a drug in his system, a forensic clue to lead Oliver all the way back to one of the victims of his father’s list, a character hitherto mentioned by never seen, Justin Claybourne. Initially trying to maybe convince us that Claybourne was back from the dead, a clue was found in the form of a baby photo (and some of poor Justin’s ashes, just to make certain we all knew he really was dead) that lead Team Arrow to the only obvious conclusion; Prometheus was Claybourne’s illegitimate son come for revenge for the death of his father. The whole time I kept thinking this has to be a fake out. Prometheus was going to be revealed at the end of the episode was Tommy Merlyn or maybe Felicity’s poor sucker of a new boyfriend Billy, I kept think. But again, my assumptions were wrong.
Billy, ever growing on my with each passing week as he takes less and less of Felicity’s bullshit, took it as his duty to track down Prometheus, just as any good cop should. It was he who found the aforementioned baby photo which made it all the more sad that he got captured by Prometheus and made what came next absolutely crushing. Billy was a good guy, just trying to do right by his woman, by his city and by his own code, all with the existential angst. Felicity, you should have held on to him a little tighter.
The next sequence was so good, it genuinely gave me chills. Oliver, having tracked Prometheus down to one of Claybourne’s old addresses, stalked the corridors finding bodies posed just as he had left them 4 years ago when he was a little more eager to take lives as “The Hood.” I marveled at how brilliantly creepy the whole scene was and was only disappointed upon googling to find out that that hadn’t actually matched footage for action scenes in Season 1. Now that would have been mind blowing.
Going toe to toe with Prometheus once again, the killer set up the ultimate trap for Oliver, staging a scene with Billy tied up and gagged in the Prometheus suit so Oliver would, on instinct, put an arrow right through him. That’s right, Oliver was tricked into killing Felicity’s boyfriend, a man he had only just awkwardly met the day before. This manipulation of Oliver, to strike right at the heart of Team Arrow, has really elevated Prometheus to be one of the greatest enemies Oliver has ever faced. And with him actually getting away without being unmasked, I was left chomping at the bit for more of him. I’m still convinced he won’t just turn out to be some random guy when he’s unmasked. If indeed he is a he at all. I have a theory, perhaps best saved for another time.
Disheartened and dissolute, Oliver found himself in the arms of Susan, but there’s still the ticking time bomb that she knows he didn’t spend the entire five years he was missing on the island. Also, wasn’t that an interesting bottle of vodka she poured from? The director of the episode sure seemed to think so (wink wink).
With Curtis’s husband leaving him upon finding out the truth that he’s working with the Green Arrow, Felicity’s boyfriend now dead, Team Arrow reeling from Evelyn’s betrayal and disappearance, and a staged phone call leading Diggle right into the trap of getting recaptured by the authorities, the Christmas spirit of the winter finale was all but gone by the end of this week’s episode. That was until Oliver walked back into the Arrow cave and found an unexpected guest, the shock twist I wasn’t expecting because I was still hung up on what I though was the inevitable reveal of Prometheus.
Laurel Lance, ladies and gentlemen, is back. Green Arrow fans — Merry Christmas indeed.
Written by Nick Whitney, ARROW Beat Writer -- Click to read Nick's posts
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