Arrow - 'Beyond Redemption', 'Haunted', 'Lost Souls' and 'Brotherhood'

New digs.

As Arrow marathons go, this week's really sucked, but we're almost there now, with only the second part of the big Legends of Tomorrow crossover event to go to get up to speed (well, plus this week's episode by the time we sit down to watch again.)

In 'Beyond Redemption', Lance and Laurel struggle with the fact that Sara is back, but basically as a blood-crazed feral beast, regardless of Laurel's insistence that she'll be fine in time. Sara refuses to tell Oliver on the grounds that he'd put Sara down like a dog.

This place gets more 'STAR Labs' every day...

Meanwhile, the SCPD anti-vigilante task force have gone rogue to put together a retirement fund for the imminent collapse of the city that pays their salary, forcing Lance to work with Team Arrow to stop them. Oliver suffers a bout of suck and gets taken hostage, but Lance talks the leader of the team down by appealing to her sense of duty and to the idea that nobody is beyond redemption, speaking not only of Sara but of his own deal with Darhk, which Oliver now knows about. He offers to hand himself in, but Oliver asks him to be their inside guy in Hive.

Full disclosure, I don't actually know if this is a pixie bob.

In 'Haunted', Sara escapes from the basement where Laurel was keeping her chained to a wall until she remembered she wasn't an animal and starts hunting down skinny brunettes with pixie bobs, instinctively seeking to curb her bloodlust by killing her killer. Fortunately, she gets distracted in each attack by maiming her would-be victim's other assailants, so Team Arrow are able to retrieve her before she does more damage than kicking the snot out of Thea one time. There is a worrying moment where it looks like Laurel might actually be trying to let Sara kill Thea in the hopes of restoring her, but I think that was just us taking the least charitable view of Laurel's actions because we don't like her much.

Oliver is pretty mad that Laurel lied to him, especially since he might be the one person who can help. Back in his flashbacks, he'd been recruited to work security on a drug farm on Lian Yu, where he also meets another interloper: A mouthy, British interloper.

It's that guy!

Yes, it turns out that Oliver Queen knows John Constantine, and as Constantine owes him a favour the surly betrenchcoated one comes to Star City to perform a ritual which allows Oliver and Laurel to retrieve Sara's soul and reunite it with her body. He also notes that he has heard of Darhk and recommends that they run.

Ensouled or not, 'Lost Souls' shows that Sara still has that bloodlust swinging, even as Thea's begins to put in a return appearance. The fact that Laurel didn't try to set Thea up is confirmed when she doesn't bring up that whole 'kill your killer' solution when it becomes clear that Sara wants to beat some fools to death. It's also somewhere around this point that Thea starts dating Oliver's political consultant, Alex, whom I presume to be either evil or doomed; possibly both.

This is not good. I have seen good, and this is not what it looks
like.

Having decoded a message from Ray, Felicty finds not his last words, but a call for help, his experiment having miniaturised him and having since been captured and kept in a lab. With help from Palmer Tech employee Curtis Holt - polymath genius, bronze medal Olympic decathlete, base jumper, possible future Mr Terrific and the Arrowverse's second 'just deal with it' married gay guy - she tracks him down, the mission given extra urgency when they learn he is being held by Damien Darhk. Ray is retrieved and resized, but Darhk is able to retroengineer a dwarf star alloy power source for a techno-artefact macguffin.

The unacceptable face of civic leadership.

'Brotherhood' sees Diggle discover that not only was his brother assassinated by Hive because he was a rival drug smuggler, but in order to recruit him into their ranks (although I am baffled that anyone would choose to fake someone's death by hiring a lethal sniper who uses curare-tipped bullets for extra fuck you to take a kill shot.) Recruitment turns out to include a yellow pill that renders one susceptible to suggestion and destroys DNA (which must have long term health risks.) Diggle decides that his brother's neglect of his duty to his family (in particular his wife and son) render him unworthy of aid, but the team insist on getting Andy out and finding out what really happened to him.

Thea goes apeshit on a creeper during a date with Alex (seriously, in what appears to be a pretty swish bar this guy hits on her after Alex has been up from the table for ten seconds,) which he takes surprisingly well, adding weight to the 'evil' column. Later however, she gets in a fight with Darhk, but escapes when he turns out to be unable to suck out her soul, instead draining her bloodlust and having a painful turn himself.

Meanwhile, Darhk offers help with Oliver's campaign for Mayor in return for not trying to clean up the harbour. Oliver considers getting into bed with Darhk so he can be the inside man and not have to risk Lance, but Diggle convinces him instead to fight in the light of day.

In flashback land, Oliver saves one worker from death, but kills another when a suspicious fellow guard manipulates the man into attacking Oliver. This turns out to be the first worker's brother, just so that Oliver has another secret to keep while he tries to work out what drug producer and magic collector Baron Reiter actually wants on Lian Yu.