Previously on Arrow, Oliver kinda died but then was saved by Maseo and Katsu, Felicity told Ray she wouldn’t help him die for the city, a baddie named Brick started to take over the glades and Laurel took over for Sara as the Black Canary.
When we begin this week’s episode, we are reliving the moment Felicity begged Oliver not to go fight Ra’s al Ghul, and if he did have to go, to kill Ra’s, to not let his humanity be his downfall. But this time, Oliver listens to Felicity and decides to stay. Because he loves her. He kisses Felicity but then starts bleeding from the mouth, which is just never a good sign. Luckily, it was just a timey wimey dream, and Oliver wakes up in Katsu’s cottage. Katsu and Maseo explain that, thanks to the snow and the cold, Oliver was only mostly dead not really most sincerely dead; combined with his will to live, Katsu was able to bring him back, and she didn’t even need a Lazarus pit.
Back in Starling City, a woman is being chased by a dirtbag when Laurel shows up, in full Canary getup. He snickers and says that he heard rumors about a woman in black who protected the city, but when Laurel was too slow to avoid his knife slice, he figured she wasn’t the legendary vigilante. Roy swoops in and saves her and says they have to talk. He leads her back to the Arrow Cave and stitches her up, not nearly as gently as she liked; she asks for Felicity instead.
Roy tries to explain all the reasons this is a terrible idea. First and foremost, Sara was a trained assassin, Laurel is a lawyer who took a boxing class that one time. Laurel says the criminals in the city feared the Canary, and with both Sara and Oliver gone, someone needs to step up; they can’t fail this city.
At Palmer Tech, Ray tries to get Felicity to help him again, but she’s still not interested. She won’t help Diggle and Roy get themselves killed, she won’t help Ray get himself killed. She just wants to be the Palmer Tech geek monkey, and is only there today to join him for a meeting the mayor called for city leaders.
Meanwhile, in the Glades, Brick is terrorizing everyone. Even Verdant’s resident DJ is packing up his stuff so it doesn’t get jacked. But not before shamelessly flirting with Thea. Thea plays it cool, because she is cool, and tells him that he can see her later, on her own terms, kthanksbye.
After the DJ leaves, Merlyn appears, furious that Thea isn’t packed and ready to ditch the life she’s made for herself. She tells her father that she’s not leaving until a) she finds Oliver and b) he tells her exactly what has him one step away from shoving her in a trunk to get her out of there.
At the precinct, Captain Lance excitedly asks Laurel if she’s talked to Sara and while she collects her eyeballs and puts them back into their sockets, he explains that he heard the Canary was spotted so she’s obviously back in town. She mutters that she hasn’t heard from her and is probably real grateful when the meeting with the Mayor begins to distract him. This Very Important Meeting is interrupted by Brick and his band of not-so-merry men, and Laurel instinctively saves the ladymayor from certain death. Everyone scrambles and fights, so though they were supposed to kidnap the mayor and three aldermen, and kill everyone else, they only got the aldermen, and mostly all the SCPD and their guests stayed alive, including Ray and Felicity.
Captain Lance pulls Felicity aside and asks Miss Smoak why a certain green hood didn’t show up during that 30 second battle, and Felicity says simply that he’s gone. Cap muses that this news seems odd since Sara is back in town and you can practically hear Felicity’s whole heart shatter. For half a heartbeat she forgot, barely the length of a blink, but it’s enough to reopen old wounds.
Felicity quickly puts two and two together and knows exactly who the new bird in town is.
Merlyn goes to Thea’s apartment because he has nothing better to do than hang out with his daughter, and though Thea isn’t there, Roy is. Roy warns Merlyn that he better leave Thea alone, but Merlyn is more afraid of spiders than he is of Roy. Roy says that someday Thea is going to figure out what Merlyn did, and then he’s going to lose her forever.
Back at Palmer Tech, Felicity tends to Ray’s wounds and asks if he’s doing OK, after being faced with armed gunman like the ones that killed his lady love. Ray says he understands now what Felicity meant; he was going about things all wrong. His super suit and future vigilante-ism shouldn’t be about vengeance for the one he lost, but about protection for the ones he hasn’t. For her.
At Arrow HQ, Roy helps Laurel suit up, offering her a new weapon, but she prefers to keep Sara’s giant stick thing. Diggle comes storming in and is NOT pleased, and tries to convince her to stay behind and be the voice in their ear, but she is dressed in head-to-toe leather, and that is not a staying-in kind of outfit.
Diggle reminds her again that she’s not Sara, and Laurel is like, “I know I come off as completely unhinged now and then, but I know I’m not my sister.” She thought he of all people, he who also lost a sibling, would understand better than anyone.Laurel and Roy fight the baddies, but find themselves little match for giant men with machine guns. As they start to get away in a truck, Roy shoots Brick with an arrow, which he plucks out of him like it was a Nerf dart. In return for the insult, he shoots one of the aldermen and throws his body out of the truck before disappearing again.
At SCPD, Captain Lance is more convinced than ever that Sara is back in town, because there are now reports of TWO vigilantes. The mayor gets a call from Brick; he recites Shakespeare, showing he knows he has the upper hand, and tells her to meet him in person OR ELSE.
Thea asks Merlyn once more what exactly his deal is, and Merlyn confesses that Ra’s al Ghul marked him for death, which means everything and everyone he cares about is also on the chopping block. He begs her to let him keep her safe.
Meanwhile, Laurel is in her office, watching the news report about the dead alderman, drowning in fear, regret, and doubt. Felicity comes in and Laurel asks her if everything is OK, but that’s exactly what Felicity was here to find out; she knows what she’s been up to in the cover of darkness. Laurel confesses that she thought being Sara would make everything hurt less; she would be honoring her sister, she would be making a difference. Instead she caused more pain, and not just for herself. Laurel tells Felicity that she doesn’t need to lecture her, she’s giving up the mask. She’s not strong enough to fight like Sara…to fight for Sara.
Felicity surprises Laurel by disagreeing. She says maybe that’s not the point of them. Felicity says maybe she and Laurel aren’t supposed to fight for Sara or Oliver or anyone else they loved and lost. Maybe they’re supposed to fight for the people they love and still have; to fight for each other.
Laurel says she’s talking awful inspirationally for a gal who just quit Team Arrow, but Felicity’s face says she’s not done after all.
For some reason, the mayor decides to meet up with Brick in real life, and Brick says that if she doesn’t pull every cop out of the Glades ASAP, her two alderman friends are as dead as the first.
Speaking of the first alderman, Roy is feeling hella guilty for his death, but Diggle says that the only person responsible for Brick killing the alderman is Brick. He pours them both a drink like they don’t have more asses to kick and they toast to Oliver. Roy looks sadly at his drink and says that maybe they can’t do this without Oliver after all, maybe Felicity was right.
Felicity comes in right on cue and says that actually, for maybe the third time in all her 25 years, she was wrong.
She says the mayor is ready to give up the glades, so it’s up to them to stop Brick. Oliver’s mission didn’t die with him; he brought them all into this mission, they can’t just give up on Starling City now. Felicity repeats her new mantra: Oliver and Sara are probably dead, but there are four of them standing in that room, hearts broken but still beating, and there’s a whole city of other living humans who need them.
In what is possibly the cruelest thing a television show has ever done to me, Laurel uses Sara’s voice to call her father. In the the breath between her first word and the reveal that it was actually Laurel, not unlike Felicity earlier in the episode, my brain didn’t catch my heart fast enough before it started to hope. It was over in the briefest of moments, an immeasurably small amount of time, but ouch, man. Ouch. So anyway, Felicity had used what I can only imagine were lovey dovey voicemails and random cheesy voice notes she had on hand of Sara to make an algorithm that makes it possible for Laurel to output Sara’s voice instead of her own. Something that looks like it’s stabbing Felicity right in the heart, and is surely stabbing me in mine. Captain Lance buys it, because why wouldn’t he, and when she asks for intel, he tells her that one of the aldermen has a pacemaker. He ends the conversation by making her promise to be careful; he doesn’t know what he’d do without his baby girl. Because what good is a knife in the heart if someone doesn’t give it a good twist.
Felicity storms into Ray’s office and demands the keys to his helicopter. She promises she won’t crash it but she really needs it but can’t explain why, can she have them please and thank you. He’s a little concerned because she’s awfully tiny to be flying a giant helicopter and also helicopters don’t even have keys, but she takes that to mean it’s just hanging out on the roof ready to go, thanks him, and runs off.
Team Who Needs the Arrow Anyway traces the pacemaker to a factory and start smashing faces. Laurel is undeterred by the fact that she’s still not particularly great at fighting, and goes in fists first, fearless.
With Felicity’s guidance, they find the aldermen and get them out, though Laurel has to take a detour. She lures Brick into a room, smashes his head a little, then jumps out a window onto a (thankfully) waiting helicopter rope ladder. It’s pretty fierce. Sara would be proud.
While all this badassery is going on, Oliver is moping about the cabin, walking around too much for a man with a hole in his torso. Maseo says he has to leave, though not before having to slaughter some incoming assassins. Maseo slits his own throat and says he’s going to say Oliver escaped, then heads off into the snowy wilderness.
Back in Starling City, Captain Lance goes out into an alley and hears his daughter’s voice in the shadows. He looks up to a fire escape and sees his youngest daughter, though she looks a little taller than he remembers. She reassures him that her and hers are protecting the city, apologizes for not being able to have dinner with him, and struts her too-long legs back into the shadows.
Thea, still unfazed by Merlyn’s whole marked-for-death spiel, asks why he’s choosing now to run. He’s been teaching her to fight like an angel ninja warrior for months…what was it all for if not to fight the Dragon’s Head? She lifts her pretty head high and says that Ra’s al Ghul should be afraid of them. Merlyn is sure it’s signing his own death warrant, but agrees to say, because he’s proud of the little assassin he’s raising.
Felicity goes back to Palmer Tech and tells Ray that she didn’t fix his nano chip, but she DID make him a quantum processor, which she thinks is better suited for his design. He asks her about her change of heart, and she says she realized that pushing him away wasn’t going to get him any less dead, it would just mean she wasn’t there when it happened. Instead, she’s going to save his ass and help him not get dead.
Back at Verdant, Thea runs into the DJ again, who is surprised to see her because he thought she was leaving town. She assures him she isn’t, and as soon as she’s out of sight, the DJ calls Maseo to tell him that Merlyn wasn’t leaving Starling City after all. Maseo promises to tell Ra’s al Ghul the news.
What did you think of “Midnight City”?
