Arrow - 'Blood Debts' and 'A.W.O.L.'

"This is not my happy face."

So, Arrow is back from the mid-season break (has been for a while, I know, but I have a daughter, so screw you,) following up the brutal murder of Felicity Smoak with the shock (unless you'd seen the trailers or noted the SMOAK logo on the former Palmertech building in 2046) not deadness of Felicity Smoak. Instead, she's undergoing rounds of surgery while Ollie is punching badguys only for them to leap to their death rather than betray Damien Darhk.

Ultimately, Ollie plays his last card, tapping Quentin Lance for the location of his meetings with Darhk, only to find it abandoned after a vicious assault by Anarky, the burn-faced revolutionary psychopath once known as Lonnie Machin. Machin represents a particular quandary to Thea, the one who burned his face, and seeing her as his liberator is determined to drive her to embrace her darkness. He's also out for revenge against Darhk.

Once more, full disclosure; he may not actually be referred to as Anarky at
all, but he is using the symbol and the first version of the mask, so I'm
going to go with  it.

A combination of tracking Anarky and Diggle finally connecting with his brother leads to a location, where Machin is about to kill Darhk's family. Team Arrow swoop in to save them. Thea confronts Machin and he escapes when she refuses to kill him. Ollie fights and is once more whupped by Darhk, but spared for saving his family (an action that Mrs Darhk later criticises.)

It turns out that we are still four months short of the grave and Ollie's promise of vengeance, at which point Felicity is very much alive, and only absent the graveside because it is apparently non-wheelchair accessible, so someone else is going to die.

ARGUS Prison Blues

'A.W.O.L.' brings a new threat to Star City in the form of Shadowspire, the Blackwater-esque PMC who recruited Andy Diggle into drug trafficking. They kill a deep cover ARGUS operative trying to contact Lyla, drawing Team Arrow into Amanda Waller's off-books investigation into their activities. As a potential source of information, Andy is moved to a different cell at ARGUS headquarters. We get some of the first scenes of him and John standing next to each other in flashbacks to their time in Afghanistan, and damn there's a height difference there. It's a little distracting, in fact. The flashbacks clarify that John got Andy into the army to try and straighten him out, but that contact with Shadowspire led him deeper into crime.

Smoak vs. Smoak

Meanwhile, Felicity is having a dark night of the soul. Facing the future in a wheelchair, her confidence has taken a hit and she feels that she may no longer have any part in the mission. Her internal turmoil is visualised as her former goth hacker self giving her an earful about her choices and her masks, accusing her of hiding behind the blonde hair and the geek glasses. When push comes to shove, however, she realises that she got into the mission to help people, to do some good after her early hacker career was just raging against the machine. She returns to the lair and embraces her role as the team's hacker and controller.

Shadowspire dummies ARGUS and Team Arrow by pretending to go for a shipment of railguns, instead attacking ARGUS HQ to try to force Waller to open the central vault. When she refuses and proves willing to let her entire staff be murdered, the lead attacker shoots her and turns to Lyla (whose codes apparently were never rescinded during her retirement.)

This I did not see coming, but mostly because the real Amanda Waller would
just have stopped the bullet with her face.

Andy and John pull a double bluff to get into the control room, while Team Arrow attacks from outside and Felicity blocks the vault from opening until the bad guys can be taken down. Team Arrow renew their mission in a somewhat melancholy mood, while Andy moves in with John and Lyla and meets his niece, Sara.

(The grave looks like a grown up size, but I tell you now, if that's Sara Diggle's grave then this series can fuck right off.)

Interestingly, by reversing the Felicity bombshell, the series has given some teeth back to the threat of death. Felicity seemed obvious and that gave us time to brace, but now who knows? I'm guessing Thea, because she has the bloodlust thing and that weird resistance to Darhk's soul-drain mojo, but I'm not at all sure. Killing off Waller just confirmed that she's the real Amanda Waller's skinny and rather rubbish proxy.

Oh, and in other flashback news, Ollie is spared death when Baron Reiter sees the glowing tattoo of John Constantine's spell on his stomach during a flogging. Then in the Diggle brothers' flashback, we learn that Reiter is also the head of Shadowspire. The plot thickens.