Arrow - 'Second Chances'

"How would you like to be named after a bird?"

After last week's run in with Black Siren, Oliver decides that the whole Prometheus business can take a back seat to keeping his promise to Laurel not to let her be the last Black Canary.

We open with a flashback to Central City three years ago, at the time of the particle accelerator explosion, and see undercover cop Tina Boland gain her 'cry' when her partner is murdered at the exact moment of the blast. In the nownow, nuTeam Arrow are going through resumes and come across a woman with a cry who takes out scumbags. Identifying her - with a little help from Captain Singh in Central City - they realise that she is on a mission of vengeance, and catch up to her in Hub City just too late to stop her killing one of the men who killed her partner.

Olly has a couple of heart to hearts with her, using the fact that her final target has a metahuman gift which negates her own to persuade her to accept his aid. Ultimately, she chooses vengeance over salvation, but it is the aftershocks of that act that push her to accept Oliver's offer and a place on NTA. Given Oliver's own chequered past with the no-kill policy, it's actually interesting to see this version of the story. For all their shock and horror at learning that Oliver was the Hood, most of NTA have a pretty chequered past when it comes to violent retribution, and that's important. Rene says that the team is about second chances, and you only get a second chance when you've blown the first.

There may be a little bit of Single White Female going on here...

Back in Star City, Felicity is working on getting Diggle off the hook by digging up a scrapped NSA investigation into General Douchebag. Unfortunately, the files have been scrubbed, but not before a hacker collective called Helix got hold of them. One of the helix members, Kojo Sledgehammer, contacts Felicity. In her own hacktivist days as 'Ghost Fox Goddess', Felicity was an inspiration to Kojo Sledgehammer, who gives her a copy of Helix's 'Pandora' files, enough information to sink the world, in the hope of inspiring Overwatch to become Ghost Fox Goddess again.

Diggle is exonerated and freed after Felicity sends the files on the investigation to the DA, but she keeps shtum about the rest of the Pandora files, which is... interesting.

There's also some flashback stuff, with Talia - played for no apparent reason with a British accent by Canadian actor Lexa Doig of Andromeda fame - offering to train Oliver as she did his former mentor Yao Fei. She helps him take out one of Kovar's contacts, a people trafficker, in order to bring out his brutal side, then advises him to create a separate persona for the monster inside him, in order to allow him to be Oliver Queen.

Arrow Season 5 continues to be a slightly uneven transition from the rocky terrain of Season 4 into a more team-oriented show. Ultimately, I think that it suffers from being the Arrowverse proof of concept, and from being the down-to-Earth one in a combined continuity full of major weird shit. Oliver's grim, gritty approach always looks a bit misguided when you remember that he lives in the same world as the Flash and John Constantine, and that his vigilante shenanigans were well and truly preempted by the actions of the Justice Society of America. As time goes by, metas and magic and aliens and whatever the hell gave the JSA their battery of pre-meta superpowers (I'm guessing a mixture of magic and science,) leave poor Oliver looking like the weirdo outsider with his bow and his discipline and training and failure to actually be Batman, and I'm interested to see how they handle this, and how - if at all - they move beyond the flashbacks and bring him fully into the present day.