Previously on Arrow, Sweet Canary Sara got got by some arrows, Felicity got got by Ray “McSkeevy” Palmer, and Thea got gone to Corto Maltese with her biological father, Merlin.
Speaking of which, we start by finding out what happened six months ago, when Thea first got into Merlin’s car. He asks her to pick a place to go, and she’s wary but brave. She says it’s not a physical place she wants him to take her. Thea wants Merlin to take her to a place where she won’t feel so many feelings all at once. She wants to be able to shut off her pain.Present-day Oliver as The Arrow leaps from car to car after a man who probably shouldn’t even have bothered running. Oliver catches him and interrogates him, because he has a glass shard from the rooftop where Sara was killed with this man’s fingerprint on it. The man tells Oliver that he was drinking on the roof with some buds, and a woman came and told them to leave. She looked like she could handle herself, so they left. Knowing that this was a very accurate description of Sara, Oliver lets the man go. As he stalks off, the man calls after him that he’s glad he’s not the person Oliver is looking for, because an Angry Arrow is not something you want whizzing toward you.
When Oliver gets to Team Arrow HQ, he tells them the fingerprint lead was a dead end. Felicity tries to cover her inner turmoil by making a joke about how nearly impossible it was to track that guy down.
But Oliver just growls, “We have failed this Canary” and asks if Felicity has managed to track down Thea in Italy. Felicity tells him that yes, she tracked Thea down but no, she’s not in Italy; she’s on the island of Corto Maltese. Diggle, too, tries to joke about the Queen family penchant for islands, but Oliver’s trademark scowl is still pretty set in his face. Oliver says that he can’t very well watch Laurel mourn her sister and have no idea if his own sister is okay or not, and that he’s going to find her and bring her back to Starling City. Roy grabs a bow, and when Oliver asks what he’s doing, Roy starts in on a speech about why he is definitely coming with Oliver to find Thea and there’s nothing he can do to stop him. To which Oliver responds that he merely meant that weapons generally weren’t allowed on commercial airplanes. Roy awkwardly admits he’s never been on an airplane and Oliver finally cracks a smile, proving part of his soul is still definitely in tact.
Diggle goes home and tells his wife that he now has plenty of time to stay home and stare at their baby now that Oliver is going to be in Corto Maltese for a few days. Lilah suggests that maybe he go with Oliver, not just to keep Ollie out of trouble, but also because it just so happens ARGUS has an agent on that very island who hasn’t reported back in a few days, and it would be nice to have someone check in on him. Diggle remembers that, at this point in her life, his daughter’s smiles are just gas anyway, and agrees to go.Meanwhile, across town, Laurel interrogates a rather tough-looking fighter. Despite her thick-skinned lawyer act, he can tell that she’s hurting, he can see the spirit of a fighter in her. He gives her a flyer and tells her to come by if she ever wants to learn how to work off some of that white hot rage she’s holding onto. The Team Arrow boys arrive in Corto Maltese and head to the address Felicity got to Thea’s phone. Oliver inquires about Thea, and though the info he gets is that “Mia” works at a nearby cafe, he follows the lead. Merlin watches this exchange go down, but Team Arrow doesn’t catch a glimpse of the Dark Archer.
Seeing Oliver makes Merlin flash back to one of the first days on the island with Thea. He gives her a meditative tea and tells her that a true warrior fights first with the mind and then with the sword. He doles out some very profound advice: “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.” Though he then takes it way too literally and pours scalding hot water on his hand, never flinching. Worse still, he then takes Thea’s hand and does the same.
When Oliver arrives at Thea’s cafe, she barely emotes, her feelings now locked deep inside her and shelved in neat little jars so she only expresses them when she deliberately selects and opens one. She smiles a simple smile and hugs him, apologizing for lying about where she was, saying she just needed space. She knows Oliver is there to take her back to Starling City, and indeed he already has her plane ticket. He tells her he misses her, and Thea says she loves him too, but that she’s never going back to the place that holds so many painful memories. Back in Starling City, Felicity shows up to her first day on the job with Ray McSkeevy. Before the day can officially begin she has three demands, in order from least to most important: No late night emails, no personal errands, and she will not ever-EVER-bring him coffee. Ever. Ray chuckles at the cutest human to ever cross Starling City’s town line and says that not only will she not have to bring him coffee, but she has her own executive assistant who will bring HER coffee. Despite Felicity’s bewilderment, Ray dives right into work, telling her what he needs her to do. When he starts to leave, she asks why he’s leaving his office, and that’s when she finds out she’s actually standing in her own sweet digs.
In Corto Maltese, Diggle finds the MIA ARGUS dude and approaches him. Honestly I probably should have been paying more attention to this dude’s entire storyline, but I was too busy thinking about Felicity’s adorableness, Laurel’s badassery, and Thea’s new haircut and attitude to care too much. Basically what happens is Diggle thinks he’s helping this guy, but he ends up being corrupt and stealing a SIM card from Diggle, but Diggle and Oliver eventually catch up to him and beat him with homemade bows and arrows and guns and fists, but not before the dude tells them that Amanda, the leader of ARGUS, is bad news.
Back in Starling City, Laurel goes to AA and speaks of Sara’s death in only the vaguest of terms. She says she never got tempted to drink, but instead got tempted to set the world on fire. She has this anger in her and she doesn’t know what to do with it. Before she can say any more or explain any further, her father walks in.Another AA member, Erica, shares about her boyfriend who has hurt her yet again, and Laurel gets that potential vigilante look in her eyes. She asks her dad if he can do anything to help Erica, but he tells her that the police can’t step in, hence the second A in AA.
In Corto Maltese (which, in case you didn’t know, is a fictional country), Thea is taking out the trash at the end of her shift at the cafe when Roy shows up. Thea is fairly unaffected by the second person she knows showing up unexpectedly. Roy tells her flat-out that he’s there to convince her to come back to Starling City, but Thea says she’s fed up with all the secrets and lies. Roy asks if she’s lonely and she claims to like being alone, ignoring the entire existence of Merlin, which one would argue was both a secret and a lie. Understanding her need to not be Thea Queen anymore, Roy apologizes for everything, and tells her that all he’s ever wanted was for her to be happy, and if staying on this island will make her happy, he will leave her be. It was honestly so refreshing. Roy didn’t get mad, he didn’t try to force her to come back. He was sad about it, and honest about his desire for her to return to Starling City, but that was the extent of it. Then he left, telling her to take care of herself.And Merlin saw this whole interaction.
At Queen Consolidated, Felicity is telling Ray McSkeevy that basically what he gave her to work with was a bunch of very burnt out pieces of a very burnt out puzzle when her phone rings. First, Diggle calls her and asks her to do some research on the dude they were tracking on the island. The half of the story McSkeevy makes him raise an eyebrow, but Felicity waves it off and tells him it’s a long story. Next, Laurel also calls for a favor, which surprises Felicity (and me) because she didn’t know they were at that level.
After she’s done juggling all the calls, Felicity looks up to see Ray McSkeevy still watching her curiously. She repeats that it’s a long story and he leaves her to go about her business.
Oliver tells Diggle that before they leave the island, he’s going to tell Thea the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Diggle warns him that doing so may mean he loses Thea forever, but Oliver looks around at the vast expanse of not-Starling-City-ness Thea has clung to for the past five months and says he already lost her.In Starling City, Laurel, dressed as a catburgler, finds Erica’s boyfriend and starts wailing on him with a baseball bat. Unfortunately, after recovering from the initial shock, the boyfriend gets the better of Laurel and beats her to a still-beautiful pulp. He oozes some gross, slimy words at her about it being better when the girls he hits hit back and drives off.
Daddy Lance visits Laurel in the hospital and asks what the hell happened. Laurel says that she knows that the world isn’t fair, but that for just one night, she wanted to change that. She wanted to help punish the people who deserved to be punished. Detective Lance looks at his broken daughter and asks what on earth has gotten into her lately. He reminds her that she’s not vigilante material, not like The Arrow, not like her sister. He makes Laurel promise to never do this again, and she does, but she has her eye on Sara’s jacket the whole time.
On the island, Oliver finds Thea again and tells her that the truth, should he tell it, will hurt her in ways that will damage the way she sees him forever. Thea swears that’s not possible, that he’ll always be her big brother, but that the lie about her biological father cut her in a deep, irreparable way. Oliver takes this segue to confess that their father, the one who raised them, Robert, had actually survived the crash, but killed himself to save Oliver. Both of their parents had sacrificed themselves so that their children would live. And this? Hiding away on a tropical island and learning to fight with people you used to know in the past but formed new bonds with? This isn’t living, not really. And he would know. Thea goes back to the home she has been sharing with Merlin and tells him that she wants to go home to Starling City with Oliver. Merlin doesn’t want her to, but Thea challenges him to a swordfight for the right to do whatever the hell she wants to do. The spar in that beautiful way that looks more like dancing than fighting, but Thea bests him, so he agrees to let her go. At the airport, the Team Arrow boys have all but given up on Thea when she shows up, suitcase in tow. All four of them do a stellar job of keeping their emotions at bay, but none so much as Thea when she gets scalding hot coffee spilled on her by a stranger. Oliver asks if she’s okay but Thea starts wiping off her hand like maybe a puppy gave her a little lick and says she’s totally fine.
When Oliver gets home, Laurel is waiting in Verdant for him. He sees all the bruises on her face and asks what happened, and Laurel confesses that she wants to be a vigilante like Sara, that she thinks that’s what Sara would have wanted, but Oliver points out that Sara had years training with a group of people that call themselves the League of Assassins for one. Laurel went to law school. Could she see why maybe he was hesitant to allow this to happen? Laurel pleads with him, tries to explain that seeking out justice, fighting for the weak, in a much more direct way than she could in the courtroom, was the only thing that stopped it feeling like her insides were on fire. Oliver stands firmly on his negative response, saying that Sara would never forgive him if he helped her become like them.
Diggle goes back to his family and coos at his daughter for a little while, when his wife tells him that she has to go into work. Based on the way people have been saying her name, I have a feeling this Amanda chick is once again going to become a bit of a thorn in Starling City’s side. I just hope Lilah doesn’t die.
Unable to receive help from her main man Oliver Queen, Laurel returns to the boxing gym, leather jacket on her back, and asks when she can start this rage-control training he mentioned.
In the Queen’s Consolidated office, Ray McSkeevy is impressed that Felicity accomplished what everyone else he had tasked to do said was impossible. Felicity, riding this wave of positive energy, asks for a few days off to visit a friend who had been in a coma after getting hit by lightning who is now awake and may or may not be able to run at supernaturally fast speeds. He says she can go and opens the data she had retrieved, which looks like blueprints for tanks, and dons what can only be described as an evil expression. I don’t call him McSkeevy for nothing.
In Team Arrow Headquarters, Oliver asks Roy if he noticed anything different about Thea, but before they can delve too deep into that mystery, someone busts into the cave.It’s Nyssa, and she is demanding to know where Sara is.
What did you think of Corto Maltese? How do you think Nyssa will react to the news? Should we have our own hashtag for Nyssa’s arc? #HellHathNoFuryLikeAWomanWhoseGirlfriendWasMurderedRuthlesslyandNeedlessly?
