Arrow S03 E12: "Uprising"

Brick is now in control of The Glades, which is no longer under police surveillance. We open on Arsenal trying to rescue a diner from paying protection to the crime boss. We have two great references here as a baddie mistakes Roy for the red blur seen over in "The Flash," then we have the oh so rare use of the word 'superhero' in this series. The spandex set is catching on in the Arrowverse.

The baddies get the better of Arsenal and Laurel as the Black Canary/Canary comes to the rescue. She's fighting considerably better than she was in the last episode, and Ted Grant is even given props. It's nice to see Bex Taylor-Klaus as Sin again, but unbelievable that she mistakes Laurel for Sara. And Quentin knows Roy immediately but can't tell his daughters apart?? Seriously I know I ranted about this before, but this is getting ridiculous.

Sara and Laurel are two completely different body types, one short and curvy with believable blonde hair, and the other tall and lean with a bad wig. No one, unless at a major distance, would mistake one for the other, especially family and friends. If this situation of the two Canaries was always intended to happen, which it's been indicated it was, the two actresses cast in the sisters' roles should have resembled each other more. This confusion of the two is stretching my suspension of belief a bit. And yes, I see the irony. I'm okay with a man who can run at the speed of sound, but this is too much. Sue me.

I know that John Barrowman has signed on as a cast regular but more and more it feels like the writers are having a hard time finding things for him to do. Having Brick be the murderer of his wife seems like a stretch to have him team up with Team Arrow in Oliver's absence. And when is Felicity going to beef up security so Merlyn can't keep walking into the Arrowcave? Maybe she could find his bug as well. Too much Atom and not enough Arrow in her life I suspect.

In line with giving Barrowman more of a spotlight, we get the secret origin of Merlyn the Magician, Flashback Island style. I'm sorry, I love Captain Jack as much as the next fanboy, but I'm not sympathizing. Keep the villains villains, and Merlyn works much better as a super-villain adversary than a sympathetic anti-hero. I love him, but it might be time for my favorite Time Agent to take a powder.

The street fight revolution suggested by the episode's title is just absurd. Team Arrow rallies the citizens of The Glades, including Sin and Wildcat (!), to rise up and take back their neighborhood from Brick. First, why would Team Arrow do something as irresponsible as endanger the lives of innocents? And we see people on both sides of the fight with guns, so why is no one shooting? It's all brawling. I could swear some on Brick's side had machine guns - why aren't they mowing people down?

Things have been sloppy on this show for a while, and they don't seem to be getting better. The back and forth state of Ollicity is only a symptom of the real problem. The powers that be are being sloppy with the characters, the stories, and the details. I really hope it gets better before it gets worse.

Questions brought up by this episode - When is Thea going to just stop believing everyone at face value? Why don't both Roy and Thea question the knowledge that they know the other really shouldn't have? Wouldn't Felicity already have everything the police have on Brick, and more? And as much as I love Vinnie Jones, why wasn't an African-American actor chosen to play African-American super-villain Brick?

Next: Vertigo, and Canary vs. Canary.



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Arrow S01 E09: "Three Ghosts"

This is it, the mid-season finale episode of "Arrow," and with a title like "Three Ghosts" so close to Christmas, it would seem that someone's life is going to change drastically. The pre-episode hype verifies that this one is definitely a game changer, and further speculation indicates that not everyone makes it through alive.

We begin moments after the end of our last episode as Central City CSI intern Barry Allen has been recruited by the Arrow team to save Oliver from an unknown drug he was injected with after getting his ass handed to him by the not-yet-Solomon-Grundy Cyrus Gold. Barry gets right to work. Rat poison sure has some interesting uses, doesn't it? Oliver is none too happy Barry knows his secret when he wakes up.

As anticipated, it's Christmas in the Queen mansion, but no party after Moira's disastrous 'coming out' event recently. Instead we have Roy, Thea, and Sin playing Scooby Gang (let's call them the Speedy Gang), and Oliver hallucinating Shado in the present. Well, there's one ghost perhaps. I have to wonder if Oliver actually woke up, or he's dreaming this while under the effects of the mystery drug.

Shado warns Oliver to put down the bow, take off her father's hood, and stop fighting - or everyone he loves will die. Even though Thea questions Oliver on who he's talking to, indicating there was no one there, we jump back to flashback island. Apparently, after obtaining the super-soldier serum, Ivo gave Oliver a choice - he could kill Shado or Sara or both. I think we know who he chose. Or do we? Ultimately he doesn't choose, and Shado dies at Ivo's hand.

This is just another example of what "Arrow" does best, the unexpected. One epic fail of "Smallville" is that while you had Easter eggs, you also knew essentially how the chips would fall. Here you don't. Does this mean Shado won't come back? No, not necessarily. Does it mean we'll never see Connor Hawke (in the comics, the grown son of Oliver and Shado, and the second Green Arrow)? Not necessarily either. Hell, we have both Speedies, yet haven't seen Speedy yet.

Speaking of the Speedy Gang, while watching, I finally remembered where I know Sin from. She's Bex Taylor-Klaus, the best thing about the last season of "The Killing," and pretty much the only reason to have watched. I like her, and hope we see a lot more of her.

In this episode there is a lot of naming names. For the first time on screen we hear that Oliver prefers the codename Arrow over The Hood or 'the vigilante.' Cyrus Gold's name as well as Solomon Grundy's are also checked. And even fanboy Barry gets to roll off a litany of Arrow's rogues gallery. Barry also indirectly references the potential Iris West by saying he has experience with someone who doesn't see him as he really is.

Brother Blood sics Cyrus Gold on the Starling City police. It's a trap set up by Blood and his plant in the department. In the middle of the episode as I watch Gold beating on Lance, I wonder if this might be the death rumored. As much as I would miss Paul Blackthorne, it would give Laurel a bit more angst, and almost seem fitting - after all, it would be a doomed Earth-Two character taken out by a major Earth-Two villain (Larry Lance and Solomon Grundy).

Oliver's second ghost is Slade Wilson, who shows up in the Arrowcave where the two fight, smashing everything except miraculously the blood test Barry is running. The results? Oliver is clean. If he's hallucinating, it's in his head, not in his blood. Hmmm... we did always know he was a sociopath, maybe Oliver is a psychopath too.

The Christmas theme seemed a bit forced at times, almost shoehorned in to coincide with the time the episode would air, and the three ghost vibe. I was pulled out of the story when Barry asks Felicity her plans for Christmas and she answers "Lighting my menorah." Any other year this would have been fine, and might give the episode a timeless quality in rerun syndication, but this year Hanukkah came at Thanksgiving. Tiny nit, and maybe time moves differently in the "Arrow" universe, but it knocked me off kilter.

Oliver's third ghost is Tommy, telling him he's not going to die, that he's going to fight. He's telling him what he's going to do. The tumblers click into place. If Tommy is the ghost of the future, and Shado perhaps represents sins of the past, does that put Slade in the present? Does that mean Deathstroke is alive in the present?

Tommy's appearance occurs after Roy is kidnapped and injected with serum by Brother Blood. When Arrow arrives there's a rematch with Gold, in which the villain gets doused with chemicals in derivative Two-Face style. Props to the "Arrow" folks for being unpredictable, but come on, I think we all wanted to see him thrown in a swamp not turned into yet another Batman reference.

The end of the episode is one of beginnings. It seems I was right on target (sorry, Arrow pun) with Slade Wilson. He's alive, and looking much more like his comics counterpart. And he's running Brother Blood. Looks like these Teen Titans villains stick together. And Barry left Oliver a present, finally a mask.

And Barry? He went home to Central City just in time (so unlike him) to see the particle accelerator blow up. Seconds afterward he's struck by lightning in his lab with a plethora of chemicals splashing on him. Sound familiar? Yeah, we've just seen the origin of the Flash. And was that Linda Park on the TV reporting the particle accelerator story?

There's no solid date for when the Flash pilot airs or when the series begins as of yet. They are apparently still casting for Iris West and someone referred to as Detective West, so it's a ways off. "Arrow" however returns on January 15th. See you in the New Year.