Recaps
ARROW: Time of Death Recap
For those of you who aren’t familiar, the Bechdel Test (named for Alison Bechdel, its creator) is a simple test for Hollywood. To pass, a film or TV show must have:
- Two named ladies
- That speak to each other
- About something other than a man
That’s it. That’s all you have to do to pass. People criticize this test, claiming it’s overly simplistic (movies that could be considered feminist like 2012’s The Avengers, which has the wonderfully flawed and kick-butt character of Natasha Romanoff driving the plot, fail this test) and that it’s pretty much a buzzword. I saw it put this way: it is an ankle-height bar that most of Hollywood refuses to step over.
Time of Death not only steps over that ankle-height bar, it picks the bar up and plays on the Salmon Ladder with it, and the result is a beautiful, beautiful hour of TV.
We return from hiatus in the middle of a heist at Kord Enterprises. Two men enter the lobby while a man with a computer bay startlingly like Felicity’s guides their actions like a time-crazed chess-master. We see a pill bottle with the name William Tockman on it, which is shorthand for a terminal illness, but I’m more interested about what’s happening in the bank, when one of the henchmen refuses to take orders and instead attacks a guard, killing him. Lance and the others at the SCPD show up, but not soon enough, for the henchmen escape by hiding in a crowd of protesters. It’s a nice way to show the political environment in Starling City. Well-played, writers.
Speaking of well-played, we cut to the Foundry where three of the four people present are shirtless and sparring. Diggle accidentally clocks Sara in the head, so they pause to make sure Sara’s not injured, and this leads to comparing scars (we learn that Oliver has never been hit by a grenade, Diggle has been shot a lot, and Sara tends to get hurt by swords and spears). Felicity, feeling left out, pipes up that she too has scars from really impacted wisdom teeth. Sara tells her she’s still cute. It’s nice that we have an audience stand-in in both Sara AND Diggle. Oliver tells Sara they should get going so they’re not late for her welcome-home party, which is a Queen tradition. You come back from the dead, you get a party. Sara’s more concerned about “the Lance family tradition of holding grudges forever.” They discuss Laurel and keeping their relationship on the down-low. It’s a cute moment, made cuter by the fact that Felicity and Diggle are in the background training with sticks.
In a spooky underground lair, the henchmen deliver the stolen package to William Tockman, aka the Clock King. He’s played by guest star Robert Knepper, whom some of you may remember as T-Bag from Prison Break and its sequels Prison Broke, You Did WHAT to Sara Tancredi?!, and Just Kidding, Linc’s Just REALLY Bad at Identifying Disembodied Heads. And he’s a deliciously creepy person here, too, because he quotes War and Peace at them (and coughs a lot) and stabs Doubting Thomas henchman in the stomach multiple times.
Okay, so if I were going to a party given for somebody returning from the dead, I’d personally ask a whole bunch of questions about where that person has been, which absolutely nobody does in this scene. Instead, Sin rushes up to Sara and hugs her, prompting Roy and Thea to ask if they know each other. She covers by mentioning that she gets really excited when people come back from the dead, as it really juices her zombie fetish. Also happening at the party is Oliver trying to reach Laurel through voicemail and Lance and Oliver finally making their peace with each other. Lance points out that he was harsh on Oliver when the latter returned from the dead. He also says that they were just kids when the boat when down and that Oliver not a killer. It’s an important moment for our hero, I think, as absolution isn’t something he’s been given much since he returned, and I like this moment more every time I watch it because it really plays into an upcoming scene.
But this party wouldn’t be a Queen party without the awkward turned up to eleven! First up: Moira and Dinah talk about the joy of having children come back from the dead (should there be a support group?), Moira and Oliver have a little tiff that Thea notices, Dinah and Lance hold hands and have a Moment. Lance gets called away by work. Two seconds later, Oliver gets a call and tells Felicity he’s on his way, and I’m going to pretend Lance just ignores the fact that Sara and Oliver are like five steps behind him leaving. They meet up with him in full vigilante gear, where he shows them the murder weapon that killed Doubting Thomas Henchman, which is a clock hand. Lance tells them what was stolen: a skeleton key, which Oliver informs them that Felicity Smoak knows all about. Basically, it breaks into bank vaults and this is a bad thing. Also Doubting Thomas was hardly a criminal mastermind, so there’s a villain on the loose.
When Sara comes down into the Foundry, she finds Felicity wearing workout clothes and beating on a training dummy. She corrects Felicity’s stance and recommends Wing Chun, as it’s better for smaller people (“Like us!”). Then she asks if Felicity’s all right, but before they can get into it, Oliver comes down and wonders a) what Felicity is wearing and b) if she can pull up anything on the skeleton key. Maybe. I’m still focusing on Sara training Felicity, which is like my dream scenario and we get it on their third or fourth episode together. This episode may have been written with me specifically in mind. Hilarious story: I nearly forgot to put this scene in the recap, too. Go me!
And since Hulu has stopped working for me, I will be recapping the rest of this episode from memory alone! In Laurel’s super-nice apartment, Lance stops by and begs for her to at least get over some of her issues with Sara because he thinks they all have a chance to be one cohesive happy family unit again. Laurel offers to host a dinner at her place since his is too small. Lance gets called away because there’s a robbery in progress…
Which is convenient because Team Arrow is already there. The robbery is going smoothly until Oliver and Sara show up to get into fights with some henchmen. The Clock King manages to both break into their frequency and mess with the signaling patterns in the city so that a bus is going to run into a train unless they stop it. What he doesn’t realize is that we’ve got a sale on superheroes this week: buy Oliver, get a Sara free. Issues sold separately. Sara takes on the henchmen and manages to wound the Clock King and get some blood, and Oliver literally throws himself in front of a bus to save lives.
Thea really looks like Moira here. It’s a little uncanny.
At Verdant, Thea yells at an unseen bartender than an hour is not sufficient notice for quitting, and tries to pin Oliver down on what’s going on between him and Moira. Oliver, ever the slippery eel, tells her everything is fine, gives her the most adorable kiss on the head, and ollies right out of there.
Down at the Foundry, Felicity’s feeling the stung pride of having her computer system violated. She assures Oliver that it would stand up to the computer science equivalent of a bazooka, and this is apparently not also the case for her self-esteem because we can see her beginning to feel like a fifth wheel when Sara correctly identifies Tockman’s disease in the blood work. Felicity uses that information to track down his identity: Tockman was an engineer that worked for Kord Enterprises and is now robbing banks to gather money for his sister, who has cystic fibrosis and needs a lung transplant. She also gives Sara and Oliver an address and they race off.
Joke’s on them, however, as they find nothing but a wireless modem. That ominous feeling you’re getting right now pays off: the Clock King once again breaks through Felicity’s firewalls and after playing a little bit of cat and mouse with our favorite hacker, proceeds to overload all of the Foundry’s servers. Things blow up. Diggle protects Felicity with his body. It’s all very traumatic for computer nerds everywhere, but for Felicity in particular because she designed the entire Foundry and you KNOW she has a name for every single thing in that place.
Sure enough, when we come back from commercial break, it’s to Felicity’s upset countenance as she picks out smoking and broken computer parts. They determine that since the Clock King missed his score, he’ll be looking for another target, so Oliver liquidates a lot of QC stock to act as bait in Walter’s bank. Sara offers to hang around and help her out so she can avoid going to the Lance family dinner, but Felicity points out that her family’s important, too. Instead, Sara begs Oliver to come along and even though they can see the flashing green “THIS IS A BAD IDEA” neon sign in the corner, he goes with her. After they leave, Diggle tries to get to the bottom of what’s bothering Felicity. He asks her if it’s Oliver and Sara, and she says that no, it’s her, she feels like extraneous and the one thing she’s supposed to be good at, she’s failing at remarkably. Diggle makes every single one of us want to cuddle him by telling her that she’s irreplaceable.
Things are predictably awkward at the Lance dinner. If having Oliver around weren’t awkward enough, it comes out that Dinah won’t be moving back to Starling City and actually has somebody new in her life, and Laurel, even though she’s gone for almost 40 episodes without realizing Oliver is the Arrow, needs only five minutes to figure out that Sara and Oliver are sleeping together. She storms out and Oliver follows her into the hallway. This scene has been viewed as a little controversial, but I think it’s all actually just very delicious: the situation Sara, Laurel, and Oliver are in post-Island is fraught with tension and pain. Nobody is one hundred percent right, nobody is one hundred percent to blame, and basically it’s all a mess that leads to Oliver and Laurel hurling accusations at each other.
Oliver tells her that he is through taking the blame for what happened He says she’s blamed everybody else but herself and asks her if the booze and pills going to help. He tells her he’s done and that if she wants to drug herself into oblivion, fine, she can go to Verdant. He’ll pay for it. But he’s done chasing after her, and to prove it, he walks away (and wipes at his eyes as he goes). Laurel stands in the hallway looking conflicted while all of us squirm uncomfortably.
Sara and Oliver head back to the Foundry; Diggle asks where Felicity is because he hasn’t seen her since he got back from getting food. Somebody should really put a tracker on her because she’s at the bank, using their security system to take on the Clock King. Her brilliant plan for when the intruders actually come is to hide under the desk. Luckily for her, it’s just Sara, Diggle, and Oliver, the latter of whom looks incredibly unimpressed at her stunt. Sara, on the other hand, is openly amused by Felicity’s not-at-all-like-the-Canary’s leather jacket. (“I was cold,” is Felicity’s excuse).
When Tockman’s henchmen arrive, Oliver goes off to fight them alone (including sliding down the stairs in the silliest move I’ve seen on the show in a long time. It’s such good fun!), leaving Diggle and Sara to protect Felicity. Tockman throws a monkey wrench in the plan by overriding the gas mains below the bank so unless they’re manually shut off, the building will explode. Diggle goes off to save the day with his giant biceps and you go, Diggle!
And now she’s really part of the group, for we get the obligatory shot in the Foundry of her getting stitched up by Sara while the guys turn politely away. Oliver asks if she wouldn’t rather go to the hospital, but Felicity’s fine, Diggle gave her some of those aspirins (Oliver: “Aspirins?” Diggle: “Oxycodone.”). Also, she has her very own scar and the ability to say she has taken a bullet for somebody. She and Oliver have a heart to heart where he assures her that she will always be his girl. Not his girl, but his girl. Whatever, it sounds different in Felicity’s head and while on the one hand, I never want Felicity to get hurt ever again, I want Emily Bett Rickards to play stoned every week.
Up in Verdant, Sara’s the new bartender because international assassin isn’t actually something you can put on your resume. Oliver gets a text from Thea that he has to go home right away, giving him an excuse to skedaddle when Laurel shows up. Laurel is finally able to get some things off of her chest about the boat accident and how she’s felt ever since, which is like she’s been with them the entire time, drowning in all of the dark things that have happened. She and Sara make up, and I absolutely love that she still loves her sister, but somebody really needs to suggest therapy to all three of these people, Laurel in particular. Like, right away. Laurel has had a really, really hard time of things since Oliver came back, which is why I’m so relieved when she shows up at the AA group afterward.
At the Queen estate, Oliver comes home and SURPRISE EVERYBODY RUN FOR YOUR LIVES IT’S SLADE WILSON AND HE’S IN OLIVER’S HOUSE. This is not a drill. Everybody run!
I think some serious crap is going to go down on Wednesday, you guys. Nobody should miss it.
The island plotline is basic this week, but it’s also about Sara: a downed pilot crash lands on the island and dies, but before he does, he asks Sara if she’ll look after his daughter, who’s 14. He gives Sara a picture and…it’s Sin! Which is why we see Sin giving Sara a hug for real near the end of the episode and they talk about being big/little sister and it’s all kinds of adorable. New Team Island (now with more blondness and insanity) also uncovers a parachute in the wreckage of the plane, which will somehow get them to Ivo’s freighter. Guess we’ll have to tune in next episode to see how!
Arrow airs on the CW, Wednesdays at 8/7c.
All images courtesy of Screencapped.net
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