Arrow: “Promises Kept” / “Thanksgiving”

THE WHITEST COLLAR CRIME.

Arrow continues to be on reasonably solid but strangely unsatisfying footing as it goes through some standard paces and I keep wondering “wasn’t he supposed to be fighting the Sin Eater or something?”


Instead, he’s fighting Cayden James, a sad cross between The Calculator (Felicity’s superhacker dad) and Promootheus (plotting against Oliver because of something Oliver may or may not have done to his son in the past). And yes, I had to look up his name, becuase that’s the kind of villain he is.

But first, we have to finish off the Deathstroke thing, which was fine because Manu Bennett and Stephen Amell are good actors and work well off each other and elevated the workmanlike “do I choose my evil son or my good friend” plot. And there’s a second secret Deathstroke son who may or may not crop up later.

While all that was going on, Diggle’s Afterschool Special About How Experimental Steroids Are Bad came to mostly an end in mostly the most predictable way imaginable, leading to an experimental Team Arrow / Smaok-Holt implant which doesn’t work or does, I’m nto sure, because that bit was hard to follow in the Thanksgiving episode with all the weird bickering and thermobaric bomb stuff and Billy Fucking Joel going on.

The one part of the show that’s actually working for me is the federal investigation into Oliver being the Green Arrow, which is plenty tense and only dumb when Oliver talkes about how he was the Green Arrow to his son in an in a police interview room like it’s not constantly being monitored and bugged. But they keep moving towards Oliver Queen outing himself as the Green Arrow and never quite getting there, and I want that to happen, so for now at least this storyline is making me happy. I’ll be sad again when they sweep it all under the rug and return to the status quo, but for now, I have hope.