Recap: ARROW Reveals Felicity’s Fate

Episode 410 “Blood Debts”

[photos: Katie Yu/The CW]

The fate of Felicity Smoak revealed! The peril that awaits Damien Dahrk’s family! The unbridled raw emotion of Speedy! The chaos unleashed by Anarky!

All that and more as Arrow comes back from the break and delivers another episode that will have the #Olicity shippers gnashing their teeth!

Felicity Smoak will never walk again.

That’s the core of this episode, right there. Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards) is going into a wheelchair, but before everyone shouts, “Oracle!” let’s reflect on the fact that producer Wendy Mericle says the Oracle character has been taken off the table by the suits at DC. Which means Felicity is not going to be Oracle.

It’s also unlikely she’s going to be Proxy, either. We know that Felicity’s father is going to be revealed as the villain known as The Calculator, who has been a Dark Side analogue for Oracle in the source material, but he’s also the father of Wendy Harris (Proxy) and Marvin White, who were first introduced on Super Friends way back in the day.

So, since Felicity isn’t Oracle, and she’s not Proxy, and she’s not Wendy … unless her given name is Wendy Felicity Smoak…

Nah.

It remains to be seen just how this is going to play out, but it’s readily acknowledged both in the show and among fans that Felicity is the strongest character on the show. From her hospital bed, she’s not only encouraging Oliver (Stephen Amell) as Oliver, but she’s also encouraging Green Arrow to find Darhk (Neal McDonough) and put an end to his nefarious schemes.

Those schemes did include Anarky (Alexander Calvert), but they don’t anymore, apparently. And Anarky doesn’t take too kindly to that. So he manages to find Darhk’s house and holds Darhk’s family hostage, and is about to burn Darhk’s young daughter when Team Arrow manages to arrive in the nick of time for the rescue.

Huzzah!

Now, Anarky and Speedy (Willa Holland) have a thing, remember, since she burned him to a crisp. He actually thanks her for it, as it’s liberated him from any obligation to follow the rules. Speedy, still fighting her “kill him now” urges, manages to fight off the impulse to kill Anarky, instead leaving him alive to contemplate his miserable existence.

Oliver and Damien have their moment, too, where Damien basically give Oliver a pass and doesn’t kill him, but it’s a brief reprieve until “the next time” when he destroys in order to build a new order.

Not only do the gloves come off as Oliver hunts for Darhk at the beginning of the episode, staying just one step behind Anarky all the way, but we also get a little what we call a “come to Jesus meeting” between John Diggle (David Ramsey) and his brother Andy (Eugene Byrd). Y’see, John’s had it with the evasions and the stubborn streak in his little brother, and now that Felicity has been knocking on Death’s door, he’s ready to pound some sense into Andy and get some answers about Darhk’s location.

It’s a dark episode, despite the moments of levity injected by the scenes with Felicity. She’s using humor to mask pain and fear, and doing it in a way that’s typical of the Felicity we all like — Fun Felicity from the first two seasons of the show — making it about the goal for Team Arrow and not about her. Even though she knows her life is completely upended, she stays focused for the good of everyone around her.

Thea has got some choices to make, too, but she realizes after letting Anarky live, that she actually can control herself a little more than she thought, which leaves her thinking just maybe she can spend some quality time with campaign manager Alex. Her “anger management issues” will be something she just has to deal with as they come.

The flashbacks don’t add much this week, except to give us another look at the magic tattoo Oliver got from John Constantine, and to see that Baron Reiter thinks it worthwhile to keep Oliver alive.

Who’s in the grave four months from now? My guess: Felicity’s mother, which will give us an entry point for Felicity’s father to make an entrance into the story.

 

Arrow airs Wednesdays at 8/7c on the CW.