Previously on Arrow, Felicity got kissed by Ray McSkeevy, Thea lied about a lot of things, mostly about Malcolm, Nyssa told her father that Oliver won’t let her kill Merlyn and Ra’s al Ghul declared war against the Arrow.
At Starling City PD’s holiday party, Captain Lance goes outside to find that the Arrow left him a present in the form of a bad guy tied up practically with a bow. (Actually I guess technically he was probably tied up with the help of a bow…and arrow. Ba dum kssh.) As soon as Captain Lance is out of sight, Oliver is attacked by a group of people kind of dressed like Malcolm Merlyn. He’s knocked out and captured and taken to the one, the only, Nyssa al Ghul.
Nyssa said that she gave Team Arrow time but they have not been making progress on Operation Justice for Sara and quite frankly she’s tired of waiting, and so is her father. She gives Oliver 48 hours to solve the murder or she’s going to set her team of assassins loose on Starling City. Nothing like an ultimatum to light a fire under someone, right? Oliver yells that Sara wouldn’t have wanted things to be like this, but Nyssa hisses back that Sara is dead and that’s kind of the point of all this.
Laurel goes to Sara’s grave to chat with her sister and wish her a Merry Christmas, and runs into Thea who was doing the same for her mother. Quite frankly, it’s a miracle they were the only two in the graveyard, considering how many people die on the regular in this city. Thea is confused as to why Laurel is visiting the empty grave of her alive sister and Laurel’s secret comes spilling out, and she confesses that Sara is very much not alive and definitely six feet under their feet currently. Thea seems genuinely surprised.
Laurel makes her promise not to tell anyone, not Captain Lance, not Oliver, no one. Thea promises and gives her a hug, no stranger to familial loss.
At Palmer Tech, Ray McSkeevy goes into Felicity’s office and tries to make small talk, but she’s not having it. She’s sick of people kissing her and running away like a couple of Georgie Porgies and would like to pretend the kiss never happened in the first place (as would I) and storms out when she gets a 911 from Oliver before Palmer can protest.
Oliver tells Team Arrow about Nyssa and her ultimatum. He tells them they’re out of time, they’ve slacked too long on Operation Justice for Sara, and they have to find her killer because they don’t have a plan for how to stop the League of Assassins descending on their precious city.
Felicity calls Caitlin to expedite the DNA results that she was helping out with. Felicity asks if she’s okay and thanks her and wishes her happy holidays and we really need another lady in the Arrow cave for Felicity. For friendship or for lady kisses, I’ll take either.
Felicity runs the DNA results through a database of everyone who committed a felony in the last three years, but she’s sure there must be some mistake, because the blood comes back as a match for Oliver. And not just a kind of close match, we’re talking 12 out of 13 markers. Oliver is sure this means Merlyn is trying to frame him so the League of Assassins hates him even more than they already do. They decide to try to track Merlin’s movements over the past few months to see if they can find any holes in his alibi. (And by “they,” I mean Felicity.)
Meanwhile, at the Starling City police station, a wild Mama Lance appears! Laurel is as surprised to see her as I was, and tries to be happy about it, but as soon as Mama Lance mentions Sara and her unanswered phone calls, Laurel lies like a Pretty Little Liar (read; not well) and Mama knows something is terribly wrong.
At Arrow HQ, Felicity finds a plane that flew from Corto Maltese, and did a bunch of distraction stops, but ultimately ended up in Starling City-the night before Sara was murdered. The Arrow interrogates the pilot and he offers up security footage because he’s more afraid of the armed hooded man in front of him than the dapper gentleman he flew around. Felicity watches the footage (which she thinks is a Hanukkah present because she doesn’t know it’s the worst present ever) and sure enough Merlin steps off the plane, but he’s not alone. He’s with Thea.
Oliver’s head starts reeling. They had both been lying to him, about spending time together and heaven knows what else. Diggle drags the elephant in the room out into the light and tells him that this means the DNA they found on the arrows that killed Sara could have been Thea’s. Oliver refuses to believe it, what motive would she have to kill the Canary? Felicity gently points out that Thea is the right height based on the entrance wounds of the arrow, but Oliver will not even entertain this theory.
Before Felicity can stage a full information intervention, her phone rings and McSkeevy tells her that he’s skeevily at Verdant because he literally stalked her by tracing her phone. Because he’s skeevy. She meets him upstairs in the club and he tells her that he wants to clarify that he doesn’t regret kissing her. He says there’s not a man on this planet that would regret kissing her, but I would argue that there is not a human in this or any realm that would regret kissing Felicity Smoak.
He apologizes for running away and tells her that it’s because the last person he kissed was his fiancé, who died during the Mirakuru riots. Felicity believes him, because she has a heart as big as her brain, and takes his hands in hers. I think he’s not telling his whole story and that our sweet Felicity should stay far, far away from this man.
Oliver, in an attempt to prove his theory, goes to Thea’s apartment, where she is decorating for Christmas. He cuts to the chase and tells her that he knows she’s been spending time with Merlyn. He asks her about going back to Starling City during her vacation to Corto Maltese, and she swears she would have come to see him if she had come back at all. But considering he just saw surveillance footage that said otherwise, he starts to wonder if he can still take his little sister at her word.
Mama Lance and Laurel have coffee, and Dinah tells Laurel that she can tell something is wrong. She tells her that when everyone else thought Sara was dead, she had a feeling deep down that told her otherwise. But right now she’s feeling exactly the opposite thing. Laurel can’t take lying to her mother anymore (something she’ll need to work on if she wants to be a vigilante) and admits Sara’s gone. Laurel tells Dinah that Sara was mixed up with some dangerous people and that they have to keep this on the DL until they figure out who exactly was responsible for her death, for the safety of everyone involved.
Ra’s al Ghul is playing his favorite game, Kill Some Assassins Just For Funsies, when Nyssa comes to visit, telling her father that Oliver has not returned with any new information yet. Ra’s thinks this means Oliver didn’t take his threat seriously enough, so he sends his daughter back to Starling City to be merciless.
Oliver tells Team Arrow that Thea was definitely lying a little but still probably not lying about murdering someone, but Felicity says he needs to listen to himself. Thea lied to him because he’s Oliver. Someone else needs to be asking her questions.
Side note: I went to a panel on Monday about women in science in the media, and someone suggested that Felicity Smoak was an example of how sometimes even smart female characters get stuck in an “IT girl” role and never rise above it. Aisha Tyler, bless her heart, said that maybe that could be true if you only watched Season 1 of Arrow, but here? Now? Felicity is part of the team. And an integral part. And I think this scene was a great example of that. Oliver is the reason this team exists, sure, and Diggle is strategist and muscle, Roy a trusty sidekick, but Felicity isn’t just the geek monkey, or the brains of the operation. She’s the heart of it. She’s there to offer reality checks and empathy exercises. They wouldn’t be half the team they are now without Felicity, and not just because they can barely turn on their own cell phones without her. Later in the episode, Felicity mentions Oliver’s humanity, but she is that humanity.
Anyway, Oliver wisely takes Felicity’s advice and the Arrow pays Thea a visit. At first, she plays the damsel in distress, so he keeps his distance, but then she springs up, kicks his butt a little, tells him to leave her and her father alone, then leaps off the balcony like the laws of gravity don’t apply to her.
This makes Oliver see everything very differently. Maybe he doesn’t know his sister as well as he thinks he does.
Malcolm meets up with Oliver and tells him that Thea told him that she was attacked by The Arrow, and Oliver pins him to the bar, telling him that he’s willing to rethink his vow of never killing ever again.
But before he can snap Merlyn’s neck, Oliver’s phone goes off and Merlyn recommends he checks it out before he makes any rash decisions. The message is a video. It’s a video of Thea killing Sara Lance.
Malcolm grins his shiteating grin and tells Oliver that there’s a plant that you can use to make someone extremely suggestible and often do things without remembering doing them. Like hypnotism or sleepwalking. Malcolm is using this video, this information, to blackmail Oliver into confessing to Ra’s al Ghul that he was the one who killed the Canary, which would entitle him to a trial by combat. The result would be a win/win for Malcolm, because either Ra’s or Oliver would be dead, and it would be a win/die for Oliver.
So now the question is, does Malcolm care about Thea even a little bit? Or was all this bonding and training means to an end, and by an end I mean Oliver’s end?
Oliver can’t believe that his sweet little sister has been turned into a murderer, but Felicity reminds him that this was, in no way, his fault. Oliver says that once Merlyn told him he will never win because he doesn’t know what he’s fighting for, and therefore he will beat Ra’s al Ghul because he’s fighting for Thea. Which seems like too literal an interpretation, but we’re just going to run with it.
Oliver meets up with Nyssa, who will lead him to her father.
Ra’s takes one look at Oliver and says, with something almost like pity in his voice, that Oliver is just a boy. He basically says YOU HAVE FAILED THIS CITY (though not in so many words) which surely made Oliver’s blood boil. Oliver takes his lumps and confesses to killing Sara, and Ra’s says that he should behead him on the spot, not only for killing his daughter’s beloved (WHICH. OUCH. MY HEART.) but also because he tried to play him like a fool. Oliver challenges him to a duel and Ra’s accepts giddily, like Orphan Black’s Helena getting challenged to an arm wrestling match.
Flashback Oliver’s old friend Maseo is now a member of the League of Assassins, and has a private conversation with Oliver. He says he knows Oliver didn’t kill Sara, but that he has 12 hours to settle his affairs and then he has to climb a mountain to the battle site.
Sara and Mama Lance go to Sara’s grave, and Laurel promises Dinah that she has every intention of avenging Sara’s death, no matter what it takes. Mama Lance approves this message.
Oliver goes back to Thea’s apartment and she lies to him again, this time about how her window got broken. Oliver tries to tell Thea that Malcolm Merlyn is incapable of love, but Thea won’t hear it. Oliver didn’t come to fight, though, so he leaves her with that nugget of wisdom, a hug, and a promise that he’ll always love her, even if he happens to enter a life and death battle with a man who calls himself the Demon’s Head.
At Palmer Tech, Felicity goes to Ray McSkeevy’s office and demands to know once and for all what his endgame is, or she walks. He decides to show her what he’s up to, which is to build a suit he calls ATOM. Super high-tech, super futuristic. She asks what he wants to do with it, and Ray says he wants to use it to save the city. And he wants Felicity to help, because she’s apparently some kind of vigilante catnip.
Felicity goes back to Arrow HQ to see everyone wearing their very best Goodbye Face. Oliver promises he’ll be back, but Felicity doesn’t feel quite as optimistic as he’s pretending to feel. She asks him to do one thing for him: Kill Ra’s al Ghul. Kill him dead. Don’t let him use your humanity against you and kill him. Think of our Sara, our beautiful girl, the girl we both loved, and how she was torn away from us. Think of how many more of the ones we love Ra’s will take from us if you don’t kill him. End this.
Oliver promises to do whatever it takes to make sure Thea doesn’t end up in a grave next to their sweet Canary and kisses her on the forehead.
Before he leaves, Oliver tells Felicity that he loves her, and leaves her in the Arrow Cave wondering why everyone she loves ends up being a vigilante with a skewed view of their own mortality.
At the top of the mountain, Oliver and Ra’s take off their shirts and choose a weapon. Oliver chooses two swords, Ra’s chooses none, saying he’ll just take Oliver’s in a minute anyway. Nyssa bids Oliver adieu and says, with a bitter kind of sadness in her voice, that she’s almost jealous of Oliver. She says, “You’ll see her before I do,” and I can’t put my finger on what exactly it was between the look on her face, the words themselves (even though they were vaguely threatening), or the way she said them, my heart shattered into eleventy billion pieces in that moment.
Oliver and Ra’s fight, man to man, flesh on flesh, steel on steel, and ultimately, steel on flesh. Oliver really holds his own and almost even overtakes Ra’s but eventually gets a punch to the throat and a sword through the gut. Blood pours out of his mouth, Oliver’s life flashes before his eyes; his father, his mother, his sister, Felicity. Then, Ra’s al Ghul unceremoniously sends Oliver Queen tumbling over the side of the mountain.
THE END. MID-SEASON FINALE. WHAT THE HELL, GUYS??
What did you think of “The Climb”?
