ARROW: “The Candidate” {Recap}

Firstly, sorry for nothing last week; real life got in my way.

But Arrow is back and it’s doing right by the women of the show, which helps so much after disappointments last season.

With Oliver and Felicity back in Star City, there are new complications for them mostly relating to Oliver’s work as Green Arrow and Felicity at Palmer Tech. At least she’s found an ally in the office in Curtis Holt. Even if he starts off as someone she’d rather not listen to. With all of the company’s difficulties since Ray died, Holt came up with an algorithm that would tell Felicity who to fire (even if it was originally designed to know who to keep on).

Meanwhile, Oliver is less than pleased with how Thea responses to violence after her resurrection. When Laurel finally learns how Thea was revived, she has plans to do the same for Sara. I’m all for saving lives, but Thea was just on the dead side, whereas Sara’s dead-dead. If it turns out well, well, good for Laurel. But it’s on the creepy side right now.

This week we met Anarchy, a new villain in the city, who doesn’t work well with Darhk, but Anarchy does go through and kidnap a family friend of Oliver, Madison Danforth, whose mother wanted to run for mayor. Jessica Danforth (Jeri Ryan), does a great job of talking no-nonsense but also caring for her daughter’s well-being. Too bad the elder Danforth folds to what Anarchy and Darkh were after and won’t run for mayor.

Diggle’s also having his own issues as he learns that Darhk runs H.I.V.E., which killed his brother years ago.

In the end, there were new long-term characters introduced and now Darhk’s design for the city is more flushed out, but it doesn’t mean that anything good is on the horizon for Team Arrow.