Arrow - 'Lost in the Flood' and 'Schism'

Malcolm Merlin ups his game in the quest to claim the title 'father of the
year.'

Heading into the last two episodes of Arrow Season 4, we find the team more than usually fractured.

Thea manages to get a message out before Malcolm recaptures her and gives her the yellow pill. Oliver and Diggle prove no match for the nuclear-powered Darhk, but he leaves them alone to die in fire wallowing in their failure to prevent his glorious yadda yadda yadda.

Felicity manages to backtrace the message from Thea and they find the entrance to the 'ark', where Lonnie is still seeking his revenge and Darhk has recruited Felicity's ex Cooper Seldon to reactivate Rubicon. Curtis drops in to help out, and despite early advances by Seldon is able to exploit a security lockdown to jam Rubicon indefinitely with what is essentially a DDOS attack. Curtis's reaction to realising that Noah is that Noah Cutler is priceless, and in fact Curtis is a champ in an episode which threatens to get way angst-ridden.

Soooo awkward.

Thea is brainwashed, but only for a while, and after a confrontation with a family living in the ark, who explain that Darhk gave them the only hope they had ever know, while all Green Arrow and especially Spartan (Diggle being in a bad place) have brought is fear. Perhaps to counter this, they go all out to stop Lonnie murdering the family Darhk and blowing up the Ark. Unfortunately they kind of screw that one up, Ruve Adams is stabbed with an arrow Lonnie pulls out of his arm and a stray arrow triggers a cascading, catastrophic failure in the dwarf star alloy power systems they nicked from Ray Palmer. It is, however, our heroes who lead the evacuation.

Donna Smoak gets tetchy about Felicity's double life, which is a bit rich as it emerges that Noah didn't walk out on them, Donna walked out on him, taking Felicity with her. Maybe she was right about him, but it's still yet another of those big old secrets that haunt the Arrowverse. Anyway, she convinces Noah to leave Felicity alone, which proves less than helpful when Darhk shows up, steals the jamming laptop and kicks everyone's butts until Thea threatens to fillet his daughter.

Okay, it's super weird how much of this episode happens during the daytime.

Which brings us crashing into 'Schism', in which nuclear Armageddon is on again. Perhaps I'm jaded from The Flash's multiversal megabomb gambit, but this one never really feels... serious. Perhaps its because we know that a) the world will not end in fire, as there are now four series in the CW DCverse picked up for another season, even if they don't find a way to transit Supergirl to Earth-1. Zoom's threat seemed more real since at worst he would have wiped out the multiverse leaving Earth-1 untouched or possibly triggering a crisis.

Oliver gets some inspiration from Felicity and Curtis and then gives a big speech on a car to call the city back from the brink of mass hysteria. The lair - including Felicity's computers - is shot up by Ghosts, but with a little help from Malcolm 'YoYo' Merlin they regroup and split into teams. Thea and Merlin take Felicity to confront Seldon, while John holds the fort and Oliver goes after Darhk with his newly restored sense of hope. Felicity talks Seldon down and he gets remote-killed by Darhk, but together with a mob of citizens and former Genesis devotees, Oliver nullifies Darhk's magic and battles the ghosts, ultimately defeating and killing the leader of Hive, having realised that he is just too dangerous to capture.

Absent friends.

John and Thea both contemplate their threatening of civilians and declining sense of self, and head off to work out who they are. Diggle rejoins the military; less sure about Thea. Oliver is also unsure, but Felicity tells him that is because of who is is. He is a person in schism, both the killer and the bringer of hope; the Hood and the Green Arrow. Fired from the police, Lance heads off with Donna, leaving just Oliver and Felicity (and Curtis, perhaps) in Star City to hold the fort. In a final twist, Oliver gets a new way to bring hope, as he is sworn in as interim mayor of Star City.

'Lost in the Flood' and 'Schism' manage to pull together the central theme of Season 4 - hope defeats death - but don't quite manage to escape from the fact that the season as a whole was uneven. A big part of that has been the rocky character writing. While individual moments have been good, consistency has been lacking. By the end of 'Schism' Felicity is apparently completely over... everything. The weirdness with her father, with Oliver, with having indirectly been part of choosing which tens of thousands of people died, is apparently forgotten. Likewise, while Thea's trauma over 'creating' Lonnie Machen is powerfully played, when he's not onscreen it sort of gets forgotten.

The re-re-destruction of the lair, the mass departure and Oliver's enmayoring all point to a bit of a soft reboot for Season 5, so hopefully they'll pull it together, and finally wrap up the goddamn flashbacks as well. Oh yeah, flashbacks. Tiana gets all glowy-eyed and vengeance obsessed because she's drawing power from the idol without protective tats. She kills Reiter, but tells Oliver to kill her before she goes nutso. Then he calls Amanda Waller for a brief cameo before setting out to fulfill his promises to Tiana, become a senior member of the Bratva and get back to the island in time for Season 1.