The episode starts off where the previous one left off – with Sara dead in Laurel’s arms. Oliver, Roy, and Felicity walk into their secret lair where they are stunned to find Laurel with a dead Sara on their table. I love this scene as the cast captures the feeling of the moment perfectly. They range in emotion from disbelief, to denial, and even grim resolve.
Of course the team is ready to go into action in short order. Oliver is the bastion of the team and, although visibly angry and shaken, he keeps his cool and gets the team into action. Step one: try to figure out who murdered Sara.
Oliver goes to the scene of the crime to investigate. While there he has a conversation with Diggle about how he’s feeling. After a short dialogue where Diggle relates how he understands what Oliver is going through because he’s seen it in war, Diggle simply tells Oliver that he’s there to help. Oliver, being the kind of man he is, says nothing.
Oliver gets a phone call to meet Detective (now Captain) Lance. He gives Oliver a file about a murder that happened earlier involving another archer. Oliver, armed with new information, is on the move. But not before the archer can kill another victim.
We get to see a touching scene between Felicity and Roy as Felicity reminisces about Sara. Shortly thereafter the team gets set into motion to utilize all their resources, including ARGUS and their intelligence database.
Oliver continues to be concerned about Thea. Meanwhile, Roy is showing his own concern by trying to utilize the FBI database to locate Thea. Roy confesses to the truth and shows Felicity the note which Thea left when she took off at the end of season 2. The scene ends with Felicity storming off very angrily after a text.
This leads into the next scene of Felicity barging into Queen consolidated to confront her stalker, new Queen Consolidated CEO Ray Palmer. He and Felicity share an interesting exchange and you can see that her wall against him, although strong, may be coming down due to his empathy.
When Oliver gets some information from a low level drug-dealer the team is able to figure out who the enemy is – Simon Lacroix aka- Komodo. Using the information about the Komodo Felicity is able to track him using his cell phone. Damn she’s good.
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| Image courtesy of the CW network |
This leads to Oliver interrupting his latest assassination attempt. A short archer motorcycle duel later and we find out that the Komodo is seemingly better than Oliver. At least when it comes to archer duels on motorcycles.
Felicity and Oliver share a moment where Oliver shows just how much the whole situation has gotten to him. And Felicity shows how she feels as well by telling Oliver that she wants more out of life than just the “hole in the ground” before she walks out.
Laurel figures that she can help by using her District Attorney credentials to interrogate this most recent victim of the Komodo. She finds out the link between the three individuals is that they were all working on a business deal together. But Komodo strikes again and kills the man Laurel is interrogating before she can get all the information out of him.
But not all is lost! The information which Laurel got out of the victim is enough to figure out who the next target is. And it’s a wealthy businessman who is headed to Ray Palmer’s fundraiser at Queen Consolidated.
The Komodo strikes, a fight ensues, and Oliver wins the archer duel this time. Hooray! But then he has to deal with Laurel pointing a gun at Komodo…she wants vengeance for the murder of her sister and she aims to get it. But Oliver already planned for this back at the lair and took the bullets out of the pistol. So even though Laurel disappoints Oliver by pulling the trigger, nothing happens.
One more tidbit is given out by Komodo as he stands stuck to the wall by an arrow is that he claims to not have killed Sara! He even claims an alibi which later checks out. By the way, I’m curious as to how the arrow doesn’t kill him given that it seems to at least have pierced his lung and probably his heart as well. After all, it was one of Komodo’s arrows which Oliver caught out of the air and then shot back at him so it must have had a real arrowhead and not some tech gizmo arrowhead. Kind of makes you wonder…
But we can just stack that onto the list of things that make us go “hmmm” along with the question of who killed Sara. Meanwhile the group all deals with the aftermath of Sara’s death in their own ways. One of the interesting developments is that Felicity decides she will work for Ray Palmer after all. She cites the reason for doing so is because she wants more out of life – the same thing she told Oliver.
Along the way through this episode we are given flashbacks to Oliver’s time in Hong Kong under the house arrest of Waller. Oliver is tasked with killing Tommy Merlyn, his best friend. He of course can’t go through with it and instead has to find an alternative to getting Tommy out of town. Oliver takes the more “Mission Impossible” style route and convinces Tommy that Oliver’s email going off was all a scam to kidnap a rich person for ransom. Tommy is “saved” just after being scared almost to death.
And at the end of the episode we are given a great scene – taken to Corto Maltese we see a kendo training session. It’s two against one and the team of two is getting their butts whipped. When the match is over we see Malcolm Merlyn applauding proudly for Thea’s performance. He congratulates her and she replies, quite ominously, “thanks dad.”
I’m looking forward to the next episode where Oliver and the team go after Thea. I can’t wait to see the look on his face when he realizes that Merlyn is still alive and that Thea is training under him.
Side-note: For those of you that aren’t well versed in the DC Universe, Ray Palmer is a reference to the DC superhero “Atom.” He’s a superhero who can shrink himself at will and alter the density of his own body. He’s one of the world’s smartest people and a renowned physicist. I wonder what they are planning for him in the show…
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| Image courtesy of http://kingoftheflatscreen.com/ |
