Thursday, March 19, 2015

Arrow: Season 3, Episode 16


Arrow
Episode Title: “The Offer”
Channel: CW
Director: Dermott Downs
Writers: Beth Schwartz and Brian Ford Sullivan
Genre: Action, Adventure, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi
Runtime: 42 min
Rated: TV-14
Original Air Date: March 18, 2015

It's been over a month since the audience saw Ra's make his offer to Oliver. For me “The Offer” was met with excitement and anticipation. Sure, we all knew Oliver was going to say no, but surely there would be consequences for his refusal. Ra's, I'd imagine, is not used to being denied and the wrath of a functionally immortal assassin must be terrible. Ra's instead allowed Oliver to take Diggle and Malcolm back home to Starling City as some sort of peace offering while Oliver reconsiders his answer. He also told Ollie that it was preordained that he'd take up the mantle of the Demon's Head, his city would turn against him, and that the resources of the League would allow him to do far more good than he has up to this point.

This lead to Oliver questioning what he's actually accomplished up to this point. When you consider; most of the guys he's gotten locked up were released a few episodes ago, Quentin Lance has decided to hold it against the Arrow that he knew of Sara's death, and that he walked in on Felicity and Ray 'having a moment,' it's not a whole lot. The threat of a new bad guy, Murmur, equipping himself and his thugs with diamond-tipped cop killing ammunition gets team Arrow into the field and offered a welcome respite from the pity party.

Oliver's not the only one. He stashed Malcolm at Thea's home while Merlyn recuperates. She spends most of the episode fantasizing about killing him, and realizing that she's probably a bad person because of that. At one point she lamented to Laurel that she can't even remember who she was before her mother died. She says this as if she were some upstanding citizen previously, which she most certainly wasn't. Back in Nanda Parbat, Nyssa is having her own problems understanding what Ra's is doing, offended that he would offer his title to an outsider. After she halfheartedly attacks him I understood him to say that if she didn't like it, go do something about it. I expected to see her trying to undermine the Arrow's working in Starling City, but instead she's befriending Laurel and offering to train her. I'm truly confused by that bit of the story.

To wrap up the episode the audience is shown a man in a costume identical to Oliver's shooting and killing a few thugs. The man tells the sole survivor to go and tell everyone what he saw. The camera panned around and we see Ra's in the costume. While it wasn't a total surprise that Ra's had a plan to make sure the city turned against him, it was a surprise to see him doing the dirty work himself. He seems like the kind of guy that would send an underling to do that kind of work, I think it would have made more sense to have Maseo doing the killing. Maybe Ra's is just bored and looking to get out of the house.

You'll probably notice that there's been no mention of the flashbacks. Over the last few weeks the flashbacks had been improving, but this week they were a waste of time. Oliver and Akio running through random spots trying to avoid goons. I suppose the lack of anything of substance was supposed to be redeemed by the one important thing to happen, “Shado! What are you doing here?” but the reveal seemed so cheap that it's certain to be a ploy. If it's not than a lot of the important events in the last two seasons are completely undermined.

Conclusion: This was not the way I expected Arrow to come back from its break. “The Offer” just lacked the big moments necessary for a mini-premiere. Half of the characters doubting their place in the world and what they stand for might work during a run of consecutive episodes, but it failed to deliver here. It was lackluster enough that I found myself thinking jokingly that it's time to use some of that shared universe mojo, show Starling City being affected by Barry Allen's jump back in time and lets get a do over.

Rating: 6.5/10

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