ARROW Gets Grave

[All photos: Cate Cameron/The CW]

Episode 302: “Sara”

Sara Lance is dead. Long live Black Canary.

We pick up immediately after the season premiere. Laurel has brought Sara’s dead body to the cave, where Team Arrow takes the gut punch and lives to fight another day. But not without first taking a few shots at each other. The emotional core of this group has been shaken at its foundation. Sara was family, and everyone takes it hard.

Oliver’s search for the archer that killed Sara intersects with Captain Lance’s investigation of a different murder with the same M.O. — a financier from Qurac in the wrong part of town now dead with an arrow through the heart. Diggle gets Lyla to go through the A.R.G.U.S. databanks, and they narrow it down to Simon Lacroix, also known as Komodo. In the comics, he was a protégé of Robert Queen’s, and he worked at Queen Consolidated, eventually betraying and murdering Oliver’s father.

Not quite the same Lacroix here, although he uses the Komodo moniker (as in dragon, don’tcha know), and he takes credit for every assassination he’s delivered. Proud of them, he is. Only one thing.

He didn’t kill Sara.

Yes, I’m skipping around on this one, not going in order of the episode. But I want to get through this thread first because there’s so much to digest here, and then we can get into the intersection with the other threads. Because there’s a lot of that, too.

The main thrust of this hour is Laurel’s rage. And it seems like the writing staff finally gave Katie Cassidy something worthwhile. This is a strong, forceful, and smart Laurel Lance. Not willing to take guff from anyone. She’s enraged to the point where she’ll lie to police officers, abuse her authority as an assistant district attorney, and beat a witness to get information. You can even see it in her dealings with Dad, opting to keep Sara’s death a secret to protect him after seeing his heart monitor give out an alert.

She’s willing to shoot Lacroix point blank, without a trial, simply because she thinks he’s guilty. Even though all of the evidence is circumstantial, and Lacroix’s targets are all related to an oil scam that went bad. But Laurel only sees the shark — Sara’s stuffed shark. It’s that little memento, from which Sara drew comfort as a child, that Laurel keeps thinking about in her quest for vengeance. That shark comes to embody Sara’s innocence, and Laurel finds herself fighting to hang onto those memories of her sister as she also battles her demons in the present.

And Oliver’s no help. At least from her perspective. She’s ready to go after Lacroix, guns blazing. Oliver is a bit more methodical, and when he does locate Lacroix, benches Laurel because she’s too emotional. In that moment, when Laurel gets to her “Don’t you dare” speech, the dynamic between Green Arrow and Black Canary comes to the fore for the very first time. This is who they will become — lovers, best friends, and terrible for each other emotionally. Laurel’s journey to becoming Black Canary has officially begun with a powerful motivation. She won’t stop until Sara’s killer is found, and there is a definite shift in the character’s tone this week. Katie Cassidy chews the scenery in a good way, for once, and gets to blast out some really good emotions along the way.

The other shift in character comes in the form of Felicity Smoak deciding that dying in a cave is too much for her. Oliver has set himself on a path to destruction, she feels, and he has no life outside of the Arrow. It’s something Sara’s death puts into stark relief for her — there’s more to life than this, and she needs to explore that while she still can.

That comes with Ray Palmer, who’s been showering her with flowers, cards, e-mails, text messages, and buying the holding company that owns her Buy More chain — just to get her to come work for him. And after giving him grief about it — in the midst of her own grief and anger, something Ray notices — she comes around to the notion that maybe a life outside the ArrowCave is worth exploring.

When she finally comes back to work for Ray Palmer, her hair is down. This is a really big visual tell here, folks. The only other time we’ve seen that is when Felicity is undercover or on a date, and then it was styled a certain way. This time it’s loose about the shoulders, and she’s still wearing her glasses. She seems more mature, more controlled, and ready to take on whatever Ray Palmer throws at her. It’s no accident she changes her appearance to separate herself from her old life. What kind of impact will this have on Team Arrow? Too soon to tell.

Flashbacks: Oliver in Hong Kong, tasked with the test of assassinating Tommy, who’s come to Hong Kong because Oliver’s e-mail pinged. Tommy is hoping against hope that his best friend is still alive. Oliver refuses to kill Tommy, and cheats the Waller System to find a different way to get rid of him — pretending to kidnap him as if the whole thing was a ploy to lure Moira to Hong Kong for ransom purposes. So Tommy gets away alive, thinking that Oliver is dead.

And the tease they’ve been telegraphing for the last two weeks is upon us: Thea in training, calling Malcolm “Dad” and sporting a new cropped haircut. Seems like baby sister’s been busy. Next week, we’ll finally see it.

[Show web site at CW]     [Previous Recap: “The Calm”]