Jessie Robertson reviews the nineteenth episode of Arrow season 4…
For tonight’s game, let’s play……Who’s More Guilty!! Don’t hide that self-loathing! Unleash that huge mound of guilt you feel bogging you down! You could win fabulous prizes galore on …..Who’s More Guilty!
When you watch Arrow, you definitely feel the dour. It is all over this show; but this season, with all its wackiness in tow, I think the beats and pace of every episode is really on point. Tonight, was like a weird recap kind of show; Arrow does this sometimes; when a tragic or important event happens, everything in the city shuts down, crime, major bad guys, somehow, and allows the crew to deal with the repercussions of the previous event. And tonight is a hard one. Diggle seems to handle it the worst; he refuses to listen to anyone telling him Laurel’s death was not his fault; it’s easy to see how he draws the line to that; Andy’s betrayal lead directly to Darhk regaining his powers, and from there, killing Laurel. He deals with it by shooting Ruve Darhk’s security and backhanding her right before he nearly blew her head off. The guilt is racking up in side him and I think it’s not just the loss of a teammate, a friend, but the loss of family; someone he tried to bring back from the brink, when Andy had left that ledge a long time ago and traded his soul in for….well, I guess he’s just a bad dude.
Oliver, of course, lays another heavy weight on his shoulders, but Quentin handles it differently; he sort of handles it like a guy who’s seen some shit would! No one dies in this world anymore and he owns the piece of the show’s mythology; he knows there’s some way to bring Laurel back; he just knows it. He faces a hard reality when both Oliver and Nyssa tell him it’s not possible this time. His scene saying “She was my rock” was damn heartbreaking, even if you go back and remember how cheesy some of those storylines in the early seasons were between him and Laurel.
The biggest kicker is there’s someone dressed as Black Canary who stole her voice box and modulated it to be stronger than she ever did. Well, we’ll just go along with that one. We find out it’s a girl named Evelyn Sharpe, the child of two of Darhk’s “volunteers” when he built that horrific creepy gas chamber that’s right out of Auschwitz. Her parents were killed, and she blames Darhk, obviously, and the vigilantes that left them there. Oliver again bears the burden and takes it on himself to try and talk her out of the revenge killing she plans for Ruve. Again, how on earth this child remodified that Canary device after Cisco designed it himself, let’s say that’s possible here, but Oliver invokes the memory of the Black Canary to talk her out of her revenge; a person she never even knew and it worked. Tough pills to swallow this week.
Frankly, for once, it’s the flashbacks that really resonate in this episode. Flashbacks to right when Tommy died and Laurel and Oliver had just done the deed which Tommy saw. Yeah, we didn’t forget. But, despite that, you see a woman who is strong, has conviction, and had come a long way in season one to trusting Oliver again; her last scene, leaning on his shoulder, saying she’s excited about the future was a chilling and beautiful way to leave Laurel. Then, we’re revisited with Oliver and Barry at her grave; yes, the time of the shows don’t match up because Barry ain’t got no speed anymore, but we’ll let that go. Then, he gets in the limo and has that heavy scene with Felicity and I loved the anger and passion in her voice saying “You have to kill that son of a bitch.” She can really do it all.
7.5/10- they hit all the right notes for dealing with Laurel’s death, and the flashbacks certainly painted a nice, broader picture of Laurel and Oliver’s deep relationship but everything else seemed to be a conflicting mess of plot.
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https://youtu.be/b7Ozs5mj5ao?list=PL18yMRIfoszEaHYNDTy5C-cH9Oa2gN5ng
