Throwing Oliver a surprise party, everything seemed to be chill, with the others giving Oliver and Felicity the space they need to possibly rekindle their relationship (sigh). All seemed well, except Quentin couldn't help but notice Rene didn't show, just like he didn't show for his daughter's custody hearing and when he visited his home, there were a few days worth of papers built up outside suggesting he'd been out of town for at least a few days. After the party, Curtis swung by Dinah's place to give her a new piece of tech he had designed to help her focus her canary cry as she hadn't been at the party either. Upon finding her place had been broken into, Curtis soon found himself knocked out and bagged up, all whilst a concerned Felicity was listening in on the phone.
Turns out Rene didn't bail on his daughter (thank God!) but was likely kidnapped by those working for Chase. Seems as though Prometheus was still pulling Oliver's strings from the inside of a cell, having his allies on the outside, Talia and Evelyn, kidnap Team Arrow to force Oliver himself to break Chase out of custody. Immediately ordering Thea and Quentin to an ARGUS safe house, Oliver, Felicity and Diggle set about trying to track down their missing teammates. Unfortunately, ARGUS safe houses are a sort of running joke in ARROW, as the one Thea and Quentin were taken to was almost immediately compromised, with the redshirt ARGUS agents being taken out by Evelyn and the freshly-bust- out-of- jail Black Siren. Yep, Quentin had to come face to face with the alternate version of his daughter from another dimension, something Thea had to bring him up to speed on quickly, but only after they were captured and loaded into a shipping crate headed God knows where.
Oliver, fearing Felicity and Diggle would be next, insisted they leave town without telling him where they were headed, something which they eventually did albeit grudgingly. They were of course ambushed on the road out of town by Talia al Ghul and an assortment of her very own League of Assassin cast offs, proving once again that Chase is 50 steps ahead. Thankfully it's around this time Oliver found a very unlikely ally in the returning Malcolm Merlyn. Neither were pleased to see each other but with Thea at risk, Merlyn was back to do whatever was necessary to protect his child, something he said Oliver should understand. And understand he did, only all too late.
Even with Felicity, Diggle, Thea, Quentin, Rene, Dinah and Curtis all captured at the hands of Chase's allies, Oliver refused to let Chase go, instead personally overseeing his prison transfer. It was then that Chase played his ace, with a quick video call to Oliver showing they had his son William and presumably have had since before Chase allowed himself to get caught.
Against his better judgement and fuelled by that desire to protect his child that Merlyn mentioned, Oliver, with Merlyn's help, “anonymously” — in that Oliver was in the same clothes he was wearing to oversee the prison transfer but now also in a mask — broke Chase out and let him go. “See you on the boat,” he said, as he steals the police chopper and flies away.
Without a friend in the world save Merlyn, or any real lead, Oliver headed back to the bunker to run one of Felicity's Deus ex Machina programs that somehow magically tracks Chase to a plane, following his course as he flew out of the city. As Merlyn and Oliver prepare, Oliver reveals he called in some extra help so Merlyn needed to keep his ego in check, that help being none other than Nyssa al Ghul, Merlyn's former challenger to leadership of The League. Catching her up quickly that her sister Talia is mixed up in all this, with the promise of a throw down between the Al Ghul sisters, they headed off once Felicity's program figured out where Chase was heading. None other than Lian Yu.
Five years earlier, Oliver was held captive by the resurrected Kovar on Lian Yu and injected with a Russian designed poison called the Red Death. It made Oliver feel every wound he'd ever had inflicted upon him at the slightest touch as well as bringing to the surface all the psychological pain he had felt over the last few years. It was fun - is that the right word? - to see Oliver forced to relive his “Five years in hell” just as that story seems to be coming to a close. Given a gun with one bullet, Kovar gives Oliver 14 minutes before he kills himself and leaves him to do the deed. Initially visited by the “ghost” of Yao Fei, the man whose hood Oliver donned, and told to kill himself, Oliver is instead saved by a vision of Laurel, begging him to be strong and make his way back to her, his sister and his mother. Using the one shot he has, Oliver shot out the lock and freed himself, setting out to confront Kovar once and for all.
Back in the present, Oliver's friends found themselves on the island only for Chase and his allies to gloat at how Oliver couldn't possibly have a hope in stopping them. Little did they know that as well as Nyssa and Merlyn, Oliver had found another unlikely ally, as he had already landed on the island and made his way to the ARGUS prison facility there to release none other than Slade Wilson a.k.a. Deathstroke.
Written by Nick Whitney, ARROW Beat Writer -- Click to read Nick's posts
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