Sunday, May 13, 2018

Arrow: “The Ties That Bind“

The Gang’s All Here
Once again, solid execution tries to pull Arrow out of the deep structural flaws of its season, and almost succeeds.
Hi, everyone! I’m a member of The Quadrant, a super-powerful, super-secret quartet of super-criminals who controls all the organized crime in the country. Also, I like walking up to known murderous psycho thugs, getting within arms length of them while being completely unarmed and unguarded whoops I’m dead now there are three of us whoops he’s dead now there are two of us but really we’re super smart organized crime lords.

The utter stupidity of the Quadrant aside, this is one of those episodes super common to superhero shows who fight one villain per season. It’s the episode where they have a plan to take down the bad guy and it almost works because the season isn’t over yet and it leaves them back where they started or slightly worse off.

Here, it serves the purpose of moving the plot towrd the actual final plan that will work - revealing to Federal Prosecutor Cherry From GLOW who was a thing for a while that he’s the Green Arrow. Which may or may not lead to him going public. To get to this point, the team gets back together, Curtis’ boyfriend gets shot a bunch, Curtis gets stabbed a bunch, and Oliver relearns a couple of the lessons he learns and forgets every season or so.

Everyone’s on their game here, so it’s pretty entertaining stuff, but agin, you have to ignore how many bad ideas the season has put into play for the express purpose of getting to this point, and that’s impossible to do at this point.

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