Arrow - 'Penance'

Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak...

As per tradition, we wrap up this week's Arrowverse and friends jamboree with the eponymous source of all angst, Arrow.

NuTeam Arrow is still rusty, especially Wild Dog, who almost blows an op by jumping the gun, forcing Green Arrow to come in and nab the bad guy, sending the team - less Rory, who is a no-show - to drop off the perp and his stolen Kord Industries(1) goods with the ACU. Rory does show up, but only to say that having learned from Felicity what she did to Havenrock, he can't work with her. He doesn't blame her(2), but it's too much. Olly suggests that Felicity have a chat with him and try to work something out.

This guy.

Olly goes solo when Felicity isn't down with the whole 'prison break against John's will' deal, but he ploughs on, stealing a gizmo from PalmerTech and beating down the team when they try to stop him. Thus when Felicity realises that Charon is going after the ACU, using the thing his guy failed to nick as a Trojan horse, it's up to the team - including Rory, moved by Felicity's awkward attempts to reconcile - to prevent the elimination of the last good cops in Star City.

Olly does his jailbreak, with Lila acting as ersatz Overwatch for the duration. He manages to get into john's cell, and gives him a rousing speech about doing his penance as Spartan, instead of in a jail cell. Then he cuts a hole in the floor with an anti-molecular spray which I have no doubt we'll be seeing again some time. They make it to the roof and Lila Fultons them off into the air, which is pretty nifty.

I'm not sure why Artemis doesn't get to use her souped-up Canary Cry.

The team do pretty well at the ACU bunker, rescuing the trapped cops and the DA by blasting a wall while Ragman absorbs the blast, then getting everyone to safety. When Curtis take a knife in the back, however, Rene sacrifices himself in a mad charge against Charon to allow the others to escape. I'm not sure why Rory didn't do this, being an unstoppable pile of magic rags and all, except that it was Wild Dog's transcendent 'team' moment.

Oliver drops Lila and John at a safe house and returns to the lair just in time to walk in at the apposite moment, to assure the team that they will be getting Rene back, while Major Queen goes back to the office and finds the DA more willing to accept that vigilantism isn't the devil's work.

And in flashback land, Oliver has to get a lead on his target by terrorising and then killing a man in a police holding cell. Now, he is Bratva.

Arrow continues to struggle to reconcile its desire to be the dark, gritty big brother of the Arrowverse with the fact that it is basically very silly. It's very hard to directly juxtapose a big heart to heart about someone killing their own brother with a spray can of universal solvent, and its more to the show's credit that they manage it at all than it is to its deficit that it doesn't do it brilliantly. While I quite like NTA's rag-tag look, it does seem odd that they're shy of approaching Cisco for gear when Laurel had him knock up the White Canary costume on the off chance that Sara might have an existential crisis.

Also, still no sign of Sara Diggle. Not happy.

(1) Seriously, Arrow; stop teasing me.
(2) A pleasant bit of nuance in a show and a genre more accustomed to people reacting with 'and now I must kill you!'