Arrow - 'Legacy'

God damnit!

With Legends of Tomorrow not restarting until next week, we wrap up the DCTVU run with Arrow's season 5 premiere, 'Legacy'.

It's been a few months, and the Green Arrow is doing the rounds of Star City more or less solo. There are other vigilantes out there, but he refuses to work with them because a) they're amateurs(1), and b) there's no need because Thea is putting the suit back on and Diggle is coming home and Laurel is going to rise from the grave Real Soon Now.

I'm hoping that season 6 will open with Oliver actually on a river cruise in Egypt.

I also find it hard to forgive his failure to burst into song at this moment.

Oliver is of course also Mayor of Star City, although in classic Batman fashion he considers his day job to be a distraction enabling his real work. He is umming and ahhing over an Anti-Crime Initiative which would rely on the spectacularly corrupt remnant of the SCPD, although it turns out that ex-Captain Lance is back in town (and back on the bottle) after his daughter died, his ex-wife remarried, his other daughter vanished into time and kidnapped him five years earlier, and his volatile relationship with Felicity's mum went bung. Felicity, Lance and Curtis are all backing the 'new team' plan, but after the revelations of previous years, Oliver is clearly still putting 'control freak' in the strengths column of his performance review, and his only major step as mayor is the unveiling of a monumentally ugly-ass monument to Laurel Lance(2).

During the unveiling of the statue, Oliver gives an inspiring speech - still good at those then - and is kidnapped by Tobias 'Charon' Church, a ruthless gang boss intent on bringing Star City under his hand and reaping the rewards of running organised crime in what must by now be the most colossally broke city in America. Church intends to hold his collection of kidnapped worthies until the Green Arrow shows up to be murdered.

"A brilliant plant, with only two drawbacks..."

Wah-wah-waaaahh!

Oliver breaks out even as Speedy makes one last ride to rescue him, but they have to ditch and come back for the other hostages. Lance provides a handful of good men and women from the SCPD to run the op, but Church blows up the building and escapes in the commotion to take control of the entire underworld. Oliver finally accepts that it might be time for a new band.

And one of the good cops gets jacked by a mysterious archer(3).

Oh, and in flashback land, Oliver follows his promise to whatsherface to take out some Russian oligarch. He gets captured by the Bratva and is rescued by Anatoly (and if nothing else, more David Nykl is always good) who tells him that a) he's crazy and b) only the Bratva can take on that guy (I will learn names) so Oliver had better start getting initiated.

So far, we've seen no sign of changes in the post-Flashpoint Star City, which is not to say that there aren't any. Church is... not the most notable of supervillains, largely on account of him basically functioning like an actual mob boss (scary nickname notwithstanding.) And the masked archer is... You know, I kind of get the Flash thing. 'Fastest Man Alive' is a title you can expect to attract speedster competition, but 'Arrowiest Man Alive?' I don't see it.

(1) Rather than having been through a rigorous process of professional certification at Flashback-U.
(2) Some sort of Canary symbol would have been a serious step up.
(3) So, yeah... For every archer there is an equal and opposite re-archer.