Arrow: Season 3, Episode 2

Arrow

Episode Title: “Sara”

Channel: CW

Director: Wendy Stanzler

Writers: Keto Shimizu and Jake Coburn

Genre: Action, Adventure, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi

Runtime: 45 min

Rated: TV-14

Original Air Date: October 15, 2014

It's impossible to talk about this episode as if the reader hasn't seen “The Calm.” With that in mind, if you haven't watched this season at all yet, and are just looking for my impressions of the episode, it's best you skip what follows, be prepared for major spoilers otherwise.

“Sara” is about the immediate aftermath of Sara's death. Between the emotions flying around, and the frenzy to find her killer there is a lot going on. The dialogue and acting in the scenes between the action are the definite high point of the episode. Everyone does a great job portraying what their characters would be feeling at that point. Obviously Oliver and Laurel are very hard hit, Roy basically takes a step back and lets the ones that knew Sara better share their grief. At first I was a little perplexed at the depth of emotion shown by Felicity, and to a lesser extent Diggle, but upon thinking on it more I understand what the script was going for. In Sara's death they seem to have realized that their adventures will most likely end in only one way, their grief was only in part for Sara, but also for Oliver and by extension themselves. Particularly there is a very powerful scene between Felicity and Oliver that really drove this fact home, wonderfully acted by both Amell and Rickards. There was an odd decision from Diggle to name Layla and his baby Sara, but I saw this less as a way for him to grieve and more of a way to tell Oliver and Laurel that he considers them family, without coming out and saying it.

There are some above average action scenes as well, including an exciting bow duel while riding motorcycles and a foiled assassination attempt. Here we see that the writers have increased the Arrow's abilities, as he's effortless jumping out windows and swinging from rope arrows in pursuit of his quarry. In an awesomely comic book moment Oliver catches and arrow fired at him, and immediately fires it back. I'm encouraged by the bump in his skills, as I see it as a way for them to put more super in the superhero aspects of the show.

Near the end of the episode we do see a couple of things that cause me to become a little skeptical of the direction some of the characters are taking. Clearly Laurel is going to decide to take up the Canary persona and continue Sara's vigilante work. This must be handled very carefully, as she does not have the benefit of five years of training from the most accomplished killers the world has ever known. If Laurel puts on the costume and becomes half the fighter Sara was, without a really, really good explanation as to how, I'll be sorely disappointed. My other concern comes from the last scenes of the episode, when we see a figure successfully defeating two armed, and one would assume trained assailants. The figure is revealed to be Thea Queen (Merlyn?) who then proceeds to call Malcolm dad. This seems like an amazing transformation, both in ability and frame of mind, for such a short period of time passing. I really hope the writers manage to find a way to get me to accept this without resorting to something unbelievable. My only other complaint would be in the usage of Lacroix, aka Komodo. He seemed like someone that could rival Oliver's skills in the first half of the episode, and then was beaten fairly handily in the second half. At least Komodo was a villain that they allowed to survive the episode, so maybe we'll learn more about him in the future. As it stands it seemed like a waste of a known commodity, when they could have had any throwaway thug accomplish the same things.

Conclusion: “Sara” hit mostly the right notes. The emotional scenes, when thought about a little bit made sense in the context of the situation. A lot of the action was of a higher octane than we've seen in the past. There were some questionable decisions made by the writers in the last ten minutes that I hope they've thought out really well, otherwise those paths will be hard to buy for the viewers.

Rating: 7.5/10