Previously on Arrow, Laurel took boxing lessons since Oliver wouldn’t train her, and Roy was injected with mirakuru and was mostly over it but lately has been having a dream that he murdered Sara.
We begin with Felicity feeding the Team Arrow boys instructions that lead them to a drug cartel, except when they get there, the men are all dead. Well all except one, who lifts his arm and croaks out, “Paco” before dying for real. All the drugs were still there, so it was obviously meant to send a message to the gang, the bloodiest gang in Starling. They figure out what that message is when they see the word GUILTY spelled out in blood. They head back to the Arrow Cave, and Diggle and Oliver get ready to hit the streets again, but Oliver sends Roy to bed because he’s useless if he’s not rested.
Flashback Oliver (I already miss Felicity flashbacks) and Maseo are trailing a man with an envelope. Their mark makes them and runs though, and ditches the envelope somewhere along the way. Oliver tells Maseo that he didn’t see him stash the envelope, and Maseo says he did, he just doesn’t remember. Yet.
At the gym, Laurel is boxing, fighting the good fight, and looking amazing. Her trainer compliments her, then knocks her down a peg. As in, literally knocks her down.
Laurel is pissed and her trainer tells her the next step in their lesson is to teach her how to not get so rattled and angry, and to be able to pick herself up after a fall. Step one is listening to Chumbawamba’s Tubthumping on repeat. She’s ready to learn, but he cuts them off for the night, and takes her out for Korean tacos.
Back at Arrow HQ, Roy asks Felicity to test his blood for Mirakuru. Felicity tells him that she would know if he was exhibiting signs of Mirakuru, and that insomnia isn’t one of the side effects of the drug. She looks at him curiously and asks him if there’s anything else going on besides not being able to sleep and he lies right to her perfect little face.
The Arrow finds a guy and bullies him into telling him that Paco is a nickname for a guy named Emilio Ortega. Oliver thanks him, then punches him in the face. Just because you’re a hooded vigilante doesn’t mean you can’t have good manners.
Felicity tracks Emilio Paco and sends Oliver to his location, where he finds another body hung upside down with the word GUILTY sprawled in blood. And this location just so happens to be Laurel’s favorite boxing ring.
As Oliver inspects the scene, the owner of the gym walks in, causing the Arrow to draw his bow. Ted swears he’s never killed anyone, but Oliver isn’t convinced. He lowers his arrow, however, when Laurel comes in a moment later, introducing the man as Ted and saying he’s been with her for the past two hours.
Side note: Laurel said they were boxing and then had dinner, all in two hours, but they must have been to-go tacos, because there’s no way she showered out her braids and restyled her hair in five minutes.
Anyway, back at the Arrow Cave, Felicity tests Roy’s blood, just to give him peace of mind. When it comes back negative, he’s so relieved that he tells Felicity about the nightmares he’s been having in which he kills Sara by throwing arrows into her heart. He kind of tries to laugh it off; if he doesn’t have Mirakuru in his system, he couldn’t have killed Sara, right? Right, Felicity? RIGHT?
When the police arrive at the boxing gym, Laurel gives her father Ted’s alibi, then goes out back to talk to Oliver in private. Oliver says he wants to talk to Ted, and Laurel asks him if it’s as the Arrow or as her angry and over-protective ex-boyfriend. Oliver’s grumpy that Laurel found someone else to train her when he said he wouldn’t, but Laurel is sorry not sorry. He tells her to be wary of Ted, and she rolls her eyes and tells him to find someone else’s life to meddle in.
Flashback Oliver is trying to concentrate on his memories to remember something he doesn’t even know if he knows when Maseo’s wife comes in with a candle and walks him through some meditation to help him remember; because she’ll do anything she can do to get him out of her house as soon as possible. It works remarkably fast;Oliver quiets his mind and suddenly knows where the envelope is hidden.
Diggle and Felicity tell Oliver everything they know about Ted; he was a professional fighter named Wildcat, but he was suspected of punching a man to death, though he was never arrested for the crime. Just then, Felicity’s computer picks up a trace and Oliver follows the tracer he put on Ted to a storage unit. Inside the unit are knives and newspaper clippings about a vigilante, and a mask…and another dead body strung up like a punching bag. Ted shows up and the two men fight and tumble, and after a wonderful and kind of hilarious nod to the comics with a boxing glove arrow, Oliver bests Ted and demands to know why dead bodies keep springing up around him. Ted says again that he’s never killed anyone, that he’s being framed, and that he used to be a vigilante in the glades back in the day.
Ted says the body in the gym had a key to the storage locker on it, but no one knew about his secret identity. After the accidental death situation, he retired his mask and his fly by night ways and locked up his storage locker for good.
Oliver and Ted meet up with Laurel, who tells them the dead man had no criminal record, and that he was a magicians assistant. Oliver pulls Laurel aside and tells her that Ted killed a man, as if it wasn’t something he’s done before, and that should be reason enough to stay away from him. Ted steps in and says he has an idea of what the connection between the magician and the gang could be, and Laurel wants to come with them to follow the lead, but Oliver growls at her. Being 1000% done with him telling her what to do, Laurel tells Oliver that she’s perfectly capable of playing with the boys.
Oliver says it’s not a game, and walks off with Ted, leaving Laurel alone in the street like a real gentleman.
At the Arrow Cave, Roy and Diggle start to suit up to give Oliver backup, but Felicity tells Roy to hang back. Before they buried Sara, Felicity made a 3D scan of her body. She says it’s to do digital autopsies but I wouldn’t be surprised if Felicity pulls up the image and has conversations with her when the boys are out fighting. There had been some things about Sara’s wounds that didn’t make sense to Felicity, but someone who was Mirakuru-strong throwing arrows actually fits the bill. Roy realizes what this means and starts to panic, all the relief he had experienced earlier being knocked out of him like air from his lungs after a kick to the chest.
Oliver as The Arrow goes with Ted to the club where the magician used to perform and a man is waiting for them with a gun, shouting things at Ted like “I trusted you” and wondering why vigilantes didn’t use guns. The cops, always with the excellent timing, bust in and start to arrest Ted, and the killer uses the chaos to sneak away into the night. Diggle had been waiting outside, but the killer knew an exit that wasn’t on the blueprints.
When Oliver and Diggle get back to Verdant, Laurel is waiting for them. When they get downstairs, Roy interrupts their talk of the case and tells them that he killed Sara.
Felicity, her voice shaking and her eyes full of a deep sadness, explains the effects of Mirakuru, and how they don’t understand it, and he could have had one final episode that burned out the rest of the murder juice. Laurel doesn’t even know where to begin processing this information, so Oliver very helpfully starts talking about the case. Seriously Oliver? Your empathy store is depleted, please go get a refill.
When Laurel leaves in a huff, Oliver asks Felicity how sure she is. Felicity says the data all lines up, except the DNA match was inconclusive. Oliver storms out of the cave, hopefully to check himself before he wrecks himself.
Laurel goes into the interrogation room where they’re keeping Ted and tells him she knows he didn’t do it but knows he knows who did. Ted tells her about Isaac Stanzler, how he was his trusty sidekick until he punched a guy to death and Ted let him loose and told him to leave. Ted blames himself for all the dead bodies being strung up around Starling City.
Diggle tells Oliver to do the same thing, to cut Roy loose as Justice for Sara, but Oliver knows that sending a teammate away when they’re at their lowest point is how supervillains are made.
Isaac meets Laurel and Ted outside the police station and holds them at gunpoint. He says he was tortured for months by the gang the man he killed belonged to, and he was going to make Ted pay for it. He kidnaps them both and has Laurel drive them away in her car. While Isaac soliloquizes about his anger and motive for revenge, Laurel stealth-calls Felicity, who immediately tracks her phone and sends Diggle and Oliver to the rescue. After a bit of a tussle, Team Arrow saves the day, and when it’s over Roy demands Oliver not to abandon him. Oliver says he would never. Boyz 4 lyf.
The Arrow goes to visit Ted, who is cleaning up the blood on the floor of his boxing gym, and not yet having replenished his supply of empathy, tells him to stay away from Laurel. Ted asks the question we’ve all been screaming at Oliver through our TV screens-what about what she wants? It’s Laurel’s life, she’ll come and go as she pleases. Ted offers a bit of advice: Cut the kid loose before it’s too late. Oliver tells him that the mistake Ted made wasn’t when he cut Isaac loose, it was that he ever lost faith in him at all.
Oliver’s next stop is Laurel. He tells her that he doesn’t protect her because he sees her as someone who needs protecting (could have fooled me) but he does it because he cares about her. She asks him what they’re going to do about the Roy-Might-Have-Killed-Sara thing, but Oliver asks her to hold tight on that front and just trust him.
Roy is in the Arrow Cave saying goodbye to his Red Arrow suit, because he plans on turning himself in. First, Oliver wants to try something. He pulls out a candle and tells Roy to sit with him. Roy finds it all rather romantic but is kind of still holding a torch for the other Queen sibling…but they’re not going on a date, they’re meditating together. Oliver uses the quiet mind tricks he learned in Hong Kong and awakens the true memory haunting Roy’s subconscious; it’s from when he stabbed the cop with an arrow and shoved him off the roof. His brain was confused, because Sara had been there looking on.
So the verdict is he didn’t kill Sara, but he did kill someone, so he still has a lot of processing to do.
Laurel goes to the gym to tell Ted that his training is working; she stayed calm during their kidnapping and saved the day by calling Felicity instead of panicking. She wants to keep up the training, because like he taught her, that sometimes in life you get knocked down, but you get up again. They’re never gonna keep you down.
Cut to the alley behind the police station, where Isaac is being transported to prison. Two arrows fly into the knees of the police officers escorting him, and Isaac demands the name of the archer responsible. A beautiful red-haired woman draws her bow again and says, with a playful smirk, “I’m Cupid, stupid.”
What did you think of “Guilty”? How excited are you to have another badass chick on our hands, even if she ends up being evil? I know we just met her, but I’m already writing out Valentines to send her.
