Arrow – 'Checkmate', 'Kapuishon' and 'Disbanded'

Police officer helps out Oliver Queen, gets stabbed.

I've left this one a little long, so forgive me if the recap is a little garbled.

Okay, so, Oliver confronts Talia over why she would train Prometheus to kill him, and she reveals that he killed her father. This came as a huge shock to my girlfriend, who doesn't know Batlore, and to me, because I straight up hadn't realised that she hadn't told him her surname was 'al'Ghul'. She also gives him the name of his enemy, however, which sends him running back to Star City in a flap. He attempts to force Chase to give himself up by revealing his secret identity to his wife, but Chase murders her and that gets pinned on the Green Arrow, who – as planned – is taking one hell of a beating. In addition, Talia helps Chase capture Oliver.

The Expendables 3.5

Chase tortures Oliver to make him confess his 'secret', including forcing him to fight a broken Evelyn or see her murdered by Prometheus. Oliver tries to break them both out, but she has no fight left and when Chase returns he snaps her neck(1), causing Oliver to break down. Chase gets Oliver to admit that heroing is an excuse for killing people because he gets off on it, thus confirming the interpretation which we have never seen before. Yes, he's been worryingly okay with killing, but murder for shiggles? This is a bit left field. 

It does tie in to our latest run of flashbacks, in which Oliver tries to channel his Monster into the 'Hood' persona while working with Anatoly and the Bratva to take down Kovar and prevent a Sarin powered take over of the Russian state. Anatoly, interestingly, tells him that the whole personifying your darkness spiel is a load of crock, and if he feeds his darkness into the Hood then eventually it will become more real than him. Perhaps that is why Oliver decides to disband the team and bring in the Bratva to take out Chase, agreeing to provide a drug score in return. Diggle gets up in his face about it, eventually convincing him not to go through with the deal, which of course means that we end up with Chase not dead, the Bratva down a score and Anatoly's best men in Star City to make it a Bravta town.

"Oliver has flipped out, so we'll be operating solo for at least half an episode."

Okay, Oliver. Maybe it's time to ask if Barry has a plan.

We end this run – and hit Sky's three week break – with Oliver reuniting the team, reopening the Arrow Cave, and Felicity, Curtis and Helix managing to secure video showing that Chase is the throwing star killer, because someone needs to be getting some work done, right(2)?

With five episodes left to go, Arrow's last season of justifiable flashbacks is on shaky ground. It's not just the momentary reappearance of Evelyn and the bizarrely brief career of Ragman; the introduction of the Bratva and Helix on top of the Prometheus arc are making this a very, very crowded season, and then delivering another heavily Oliver-centric run after the early focus on the team (which here is disbanded for all of half an episode(3).) I don't buy Oliver as a secret psychopath, personally, and I feel that more attention could have been given to the fact that he's frankly damaged and has never fully confronted that fact; has barely looked at it beyond a periodic reinvention of his alias. At this point, the focus on Oliver over the team is, I think, actively harmful, especially as, whatever its strengths, Arrow has not given its lead the kind of overarching competence to justify his level of Bat-brooding (and I'm not saying that it should; I like team shows when they're done well.)

(1) Turns out this was a fakeout, which saves this being the worst case of fridging in the Arrowverse.

(2) Oh, the irony that I'm typing this up during a slow period at work.

(3) I find myself comparing this unfavourably to the beige phase of Season 2 of Angel, and that's pretty damning.