Arrow - 'Streets of Fire' and 'Unthinkable'

This is a variation on the iconic costume of the supervillain Ravager, who is
(in comics) either a man or Slade's illegitimate daughter Rose. Somehow the
live action version of the mask looks more like fetishwear than the comics.

The final two episodes of Season 2 of Arrow are all go.

In 'Streets of Fire' Team Arrow struggles to regroup, with the Foundry compromised and Deathstroke outmanouevring them at every turn (although Felicity saves Diggle by hitting Isabel with a car.) Wilson captures the Star Labs Mirakuru cure, but Sebastian Blood - who still thinks he's the good guy - turns on Slade after a massacre of his staff and steals it back, getting a couple of swords through the chest for his trouble. With Amanda Waller ready to daisycutter Starling City to ash rather than let Deathstroke and his army escape, Oliver has no choice but to test the cure on Roy. Sara returns and Laurel convinces her she can be a hero, in time for a reunion with the reinstated Detective Lance, leading the charge as the SCPD falls in behind a masked vigilante on the basis that he's the only one with a clue what's happening. And at the train station, Thea is rescued from one of the Mirakuru thugs by a masked archer - her father, Malcolm Merlyn.

This was fucking badass.

In 'Unthinkable', Sara unveils the cavalry - by promising to return to them, she has brought Nyssa and a band of League Assassins to assist in delivering the Mirakuru cure, along with Diggle and Roy, the latter sans Mirakuru strength, but also sans 'roid rage and wearing a shiny new red domino mask. This leads to a conflict of methods, but Oliver's no killing policy largely prevails (with the exception of Isabel Rochev, who is apparently too much of an arrogant bitch for Nyssa to stomach.)

"I am Nyssa al Ghul, heir to the Demon."
"Felicity Smoake, MIT class of '09."
We love you so, Felicity.

Oliver then sets a trap for Slade, who has kidnapped Laurel so he can kill the person Oliver most loves. Oliver hides Felicity in his bugged house and says that she is the one he truly loves, so that when Slade grabs her she can get close enough to stick him with the cure because - and I can not stress this enough - Felicity Smoake is a fucking badass and the real hero of this series. Her face off with Nyssa al Ghul is a highlight of the series. My other favourite moment of this episode was when Team Arrow flee Oliver's clocktower sulking pad ahead of a mob of goons, only for Lyla to blow the whole tower up with a missile launcher out of a helicopter widow, and Diggle's expression when he sees her (it's pretty much shouting 'damn, that's hot.')

Oh, and Oliver fights and defeats Slade while Lyla and Diggle bust out the Suicide Squad to delay Waller's drone strike. Slade tries to goad Oliver into killing him, but Oliver delivers him to an ARGUS blacksite on Lian Yu and thanks him for helping him to become a hero.

Sara goes off with Nyssa and Quentin collapses because someone in this series has to actually suffer long term effects from being thrown into walls by superhuman thugs. Roy tries to reconcile with Thea, but she finds his spare bow (seriously; he apparently has two bows, despite at last view before the coma still being a crap shot) and eventually goes off with Malcolm Merlyn on the basis that she's fucked off with people lying their arses off to her and he is at least a plain dealing villain*. Interestingly, this is almost a theme in the DCTVU - secret identities are basically a bad thing.

In flashbacks over the two episodes, we see Oliver once more attempting to rescue Sara from the Amazo as we build towards his first 'killing' of Slade Wilson, while Wilson goes increasingly crazy from imaginary Shado taunting him all the time and urging him to murder up Oliver a treat. This ends with Oliver putting that arrow through Slade's eye after Anatoly (the jovial Bratva leader, played by Stargate Atlantis's ensemble darkhorse Peter Nikl) torpedoes the Amazo and Sara is sucked out of the sinking ship. Oliver blacks out and wakes from unconsciousness in Hong Kong, to be greeted by Amanda Waller.

Season 2 of Arrow is a massive improvement on Season 1 in terms of pacing, especially in terms of the flashbacks. In that regard, the decision to have it turn out that he didn't spend five years on an island developing high-tech crimefighting solutions is a very good one. The cast is getting a bit unwieldy - although the finale trims it back a bit - but that's actually no bad thing, taking the focus off Oliver's grumpy monkey act in favour of a more ensemble vibe (although Roy and Sara mostly rock variations on the ill-tempered primate look.) What it also does well is build elements of a coherent world; those feeding into Flash and hinting at other comics, but also the establishment of this world's League of Assassins, ARGUS and just something other than Starling City here and Lian Yu there and not much else besides this mythical 'Australia' that Slade Wilson claims to come from.

Right; now we just need to get through Season 3 before Season 4 arrives in... oh, about a month, probably.

* Actually, he's a deluded, self-justifying toolbag, but she can be forgiven for being in a bad place.