Arrow: Broken Arrow
April 16, 2015 5:34 AM - Season 3, Episode 19 - Subscribe

Ra's al Ghul keeps demanding. Oliver keeps denying. Roy keeps confessing. Ray keeps failing. Captain Lance keeps seething.

Roy has confessed to being the Arrow and the SCPD has charged him with it, leaving Laurel free to drop the charges against Oliver. He does not like this, but Laurel quickly shuts him up.

Roy deals with threats in prison and Oliver plans to break him out, but the rest of the team talk him out of it, saying it risks everything in their bigger mission.

Meanwhile, a new metahuman arrives in Starling and is killing people with electrical attacks. Oliver turns to Ray for help since he can't go out as the Arrow. During Atom's first meeting with the meta, Ray has his ass handed to him.

Lance searches Verdant's basement and finds the Arrowcave, conveniently wiped of all fingerprints but Roy's. He swears he will move heaven and earth to prove Oliver is the Arrow. A colleague warns Lance that the brass wonders why he is wasting his time on Queen when he has Roy in custody and that it looks bad.

Oliver tells Ray that he can help him fight the meta with him controlling the Atom suit's punches remotely. When the network is damaged, Ray takes down the meta himself and takes him to STAR Labs where he dubs him Deathbolt (and Cisco approves, saying he's the only other person who gets the nickname thing).

Roy is attacked in prison by a guard, killing him. Oliver blames himself. Lance agrees. Diggle and Felicity reveal that Roy is not dead at all. He was stabbed by a former ARGUS agent working with Team Arrow that made him appear dead. Roy reveals to Oliver that it was his idea all along and that Oliver needs to let people help him.

Five years ago, some crap about General Shrieve wanting to drop the virus in China to start a war. Oliver finds Waller who tells him that she didn't do this and she hopes to run into him some day.

In present day, Roy has to leave town forever to keep up his kayfabe death. He tells Oliver to tell Thea the truth about him not being dead.

Speaking of Thea, Ra's al Ghul stabs and kills her.

Will Oliver just say yes and then change all the rules of the League like Ra's said he could when he made the offer to begin with???? Stay tuned!
posted by inturnaround (17 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
Dear super hero screen writers,


LET PEOPLE STAY DEAD!


No one ever dies.

I'm 100% confident Thea survives, and even if she dies she'll just get a super power or become a cyborg, or something.

Death in super hero films is no longer suspenseful because it's become meaningless. I knew Roy wasn't really dead. I knew Oliver wasn't dead. I thought I knew Malcolm Merlyn was dead..but then they decided he wasn't.

I'm expecting Moira Queen to come back next season, maybe with Sara Lance and the cop Roy shot.
posted by FallowKing at 6:43 AM on April 16, 2015


Well, Malcolm's son stayed dead. There's that. But, yeah, I'm not convinced Thea will stay dead, assuming she is dead. She could be moments away from Oliver stumbling in and rushing her to the ER.

I love that apparently there's no budget to show upstairs in Thea's apt. Maybe if they stopped with the pointless, boring flashbacks. I used to love Hong Kong.
posted by Ik ben afgesneden at 7:03 AM on April 16, 2015


I suspect that Ra's is going to dangle the Lazarus Hot Tub in front of Oliver to convince him to surrender. Becoming the new Ra's will give him access to the resources needed to bring Thea back.
posted by insert.witticism.here at 7:43 AM on April 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


I was hoping Captain Lance was going to run into the metahuman, but he's so focused on his vendetta that he didn't even seem to be aware of what was going on. I wish someone would point out to him that the guy who told him that Oliver is the Arrow is also the one responsible for all the murders, but I guess he wouldn't care. I think the writers have taken his monomania too far; it's become as ridiculous as it is tedious.
posted by homunculus at 9:40 AM on April 16, 2015


I suspect that Ra's is going to dangle the Lazarus Hot Tub in front of Oliver to convince him to surrender. Becoming the new Ra's will give him access to the resources needed to bring Thea back.

Yeah, I mean, this is the only way that killing Thea can possibly be construed as a way of motivating Oliver to do what Ra's wants; otherwise this is more like motivating Oliver to stop at nothing to kill him, up to and possibly including have Amanda Waller nuke Starling City.

It does say something when "character is dead" means "will probably be back in the next episode" and "character is leaving town" means "character may actually be gone for several episodes". Thea, she'll be back, like, immediately, but Roy? Who knows when he'll be back.

maybe with Sara Lance

Fun fact, Caity Lotz (the actress who played Sara Lance) is supposedly going to be a regular in the spin-off series with Ray and Captain Cold.
posted by mstokes650 at 10:29 AM on April 16, 2015


I thought I maybe sorta saw Thea in the Lazarus Pit in the previews for next week? Maybe not.

Is it just my imagination or is Verdant closed 24 hours a day? What's the deal?
posted by the webmistress at 12:21 PM on April 16, 2015


How many abandoned warehouses are there in Starling City?
posted by Ik ben afgesneden at 7:11 PM on April 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


How many abandoned warehouses are there in Starling City?

And how do the people in the Flash's secret prison eat and uh, "complete the transaction"?

Dammit, writers, lampshading these questions is not the same as answering them!
posted by mstokes650 at 8:25 PM on April 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


Will Oliver just say yes and then change all the rules of the League like Ra's said he could when he made the offer to begin with?

I feel super redundant saying "yea this doesn't make sense" about anything in this plotline, but for sure this stopped being a question that could be ignored when Felicity tells Oliver that one way or the other, being the Arrow is done.

We will of course put aside the fact that we know that if they bothered to say this out loud that it's obviously going to be not true, even aside from the fact that the fucking show is named Arrow.

But at that point and shortly after Roy gets seemingly dead and you can't effectively fight crime anymore... why would you not do that? Even if it's just as a time-buying tactic so you can get ARGUS to bust/long-range-shoot all the remaining League members?

Or just move League HQ to Starling, put everyone in dopey vigilante costumes and task them with no-killing crime prevention. Most of them will just quit and fuck off elsewhere and your problem is solved. It's not like you can claim you can't do this because then they'll be out there and leaderless; you're doing nothing to combat the League as it is.

This episode, for me, was bordering on stop-watching-bad, it irked me so much. Several times people say things that some writer clearly wrote because it sounded cool in a line read even though it doesn't make any damned sense within the conversation. Cpt. Lance and Roy talking in the cell was the first example that comes to mind but it was all over. Those poor actors. If acting is reacting then nobody got to act with anyone other than their own script pages here.

Is this the first actual metahuman we've seen on the show? I think it is, barring of course Barry. I was surprised they did it since I felt like they went out of their way to avoid such people in Arrow. But perhaps the "this wasn't dark matter created" bit with Cisco was an indication of something else - presumably setup aspect for Ray Palmer's new show.
posted by phearlez at 8:51 AM on April 17, 2015 [1 favorite]


So it's a team up. High five! ... Stop calling it a team up.
posted by ktkt at 6:37 PM on April 17, 2015


I'm 100% confident Thea survives

Everything with people not staying dead (except Sara!) has been foreshadowing for this IMO. Because the comics people know what comes next and apparently it's in the promo for next week, which I haven't seen but have heard about.

I did like the fight between Ra's and Thea even if I'm not crazy about the ending or the plot point.
posted by immlass at 8:45 PM on April 17, 2015


Is this the first actual metahuman we've seen on the show? I think it is, barring of course Barry. I was surprised they did it since I felt like they went out of their way to avoid such people in Arrow. But perhaps the "this wasn't dark matter created" bit with Cisco was an indication of something else - presumably setup aspect for Ray Palmer's new show.

Yup, yup, yup, and yup.

Wait, was that too many or not enough "yup"'s?

Well, anyway, I agree with everything you said there.
posted by soundguy99 at 8:21 PM on April 21, 2015


And how do the people in the Flash's secret prison eat and uh, "complete the transaction"?

Apparently Flash & Arrow are both going crossover-crazy here at the end of the season, which might very well backfire, since I suspect no small number of people watch one but not the other.
posted by soundguy99 at 8:24 PM on April 21, 2015


I'm in the Arrow-only camp, but I think the Flash-only group is a lot bigger from what I see around the internet.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 10:45 PM on April 21, 2015


Also in the Arrow-only camp. The cross-overs are annoying but no more so than the endless HK flashbacks.
posted by Ik ben afgesneden at 6:04 AM on April 22, 2015


Oliver: you can't even manage a bro-hug for Roy when you find out he's alive? Are you completely dead inside? Even Spock shows his happiness — for a second — when he discovers Kirk is alive.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 4:52 PM on April 25, 2015


I am attempting to force myself to watch the rest of Arrow (I am not caught up on much), but I just wanted to say I enjoyed the snark of this recap.

"Five years ago, some crap about General Shrieve wanting to drop the virus in China to start a war."


Yeah, WHO CARES ABOUT THE FLASHBACKS, NOBODY CARES, THEY ARE BORING AND I DON'T CARE AND I IGNORE 40% OF THE SHOW BECAUSE OF THEM.

Like Ray, I still want to know how the prisoners on Flash "complete the transaction." Also, HAH.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:58 AM on May 15, 2015


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