ARROW: “Broken Arrow” Recap

There’s plenty of big news from this week and we’ll get to that, but rather than looking at how someone left Team Arrow, but for now, we’ll look at everything from both Felicity’s and Thea’s perception.

Given what happened in this week’s The Flash, Felicity has some serious issues to work on with her relationship with Ray (and what their boundaries are), but those are secondary to the metahuman, Jake Simmons (guest star Doug Jones), and his terror through town. Of course, there are still moments where she’s in the background (why no guy thinks that Felicity can handle herself in a fight when she also distracts Simmons with compressed air?) but most of the time, she’s hacking away and also worrying about how to save Oliver from being arrested for being the Arrow.

Of course, her work still doesn’t manage to keep Roy safe (and we’ll get to that more later), but she does have the ability to be such a useful member of the team if the guys would stop seeing her dresses or glasses as something that stops her from having thoughts and feelings above her hacking skills. But at least she has a heart and courage to stand up for what she believes in – even if it pisses off Oliver in the process. Felicity can see Roy drive off into the dark night to places unknown but that might be the exact moment that her words get to Oliver and he realizes he needs help.

That moment also might be the first time Ray sees that he’s probably lost his battle for Felicity’s heart, but let’s now go there right now.

Thea, Thea, Thea. Still the woman who can’t have people tell her the truth. She has to sit and watch Roy get arrested, watch her club be searched for information on Oliver being the Arrow (of which there’s none because Felicity is capable), but she also has to stand and watch Captain Lance tell her her brother’s a liar as he looks for evidence that isn’t there.

She doesn’t even get to say goodbye to Roy, but she does have an intense fight with R’as al Ghul, where she gets stabbed in the chest (and maybe is dead – who knows right now). How can she not catch a break?

First she’s Merlyn’s puppet, then Oliver can’t tell her enough and once she does know enough, she’s forced to sit around and react to what everyone else does around her.

But that raises the interesting question, why can’t the ladies do something that has very little to do with Oliver? Objectively I know that Oliver is the star, but these women are strong even when they aren’t part of Oliver’s orbit. They have lives (we’ve seen that they can do things alone), but is it that R’as al Ghul wants to control Oliver so much that everyone’s wrapped in that web? Or something else?

Arrow airs Wednesday at 8 PM Eastern/7 PM Central on The CW.