ARROW “Dangerous Liaisons” Review

By Justin Carter

Dangerous Liaisons

Earlier this season, Arrow saw Oliver Queen go up against a WWE wrestler for what amounted to a rematch of a match Stephen Amell did over the summer break. It was one of those moments that was completely ridiculous and also really earned, starting with Oliver grappling then jump punching him in slow motion and ending with the emerald archer walking away from his defeated enemy as explosions fly.

I didn’t really think that any following episodes could top that moment, but then this week’s episode opens with ARGUS forces and Team Arrow tracking Adrian Chase down to an abandoned arcade. All’s well and good until someone trips an alarm and it turns out that Chase has loaded the arcade guns with real bullets and rigged shuriken to launch when someone opens a door. And just for good measure, an 8-bit version of him in his Prometheus outfit pops up on one of the machines reading “Game Over.” It’s dumb, but a nice touch that feels like something Chase would do just as a gag, and all of a sudden that WWE moment is topped.

With the whole world now aware Chase is Prometheus, everyone in Team Arrow is doing what they can to track him down or play damage control towards the press and families of his victims. This is where Felicity’s dealings with Helix come back to bite her, with her trusty hacker friend Alena learning that Chase has a mole inside City Hall feeding him intel and then accidentally killing him to get his information. This leads them the discovery that ARGUS has been holding the world’s greatest hacker (and founder of Helix) in prison for months, so Felicity is forced into helping break him out in exchange for a way to track Chase down.

It’s been obvious since Helix first became a player that things would go south for Team Arrow, and that’s sure enough what happens here. Felicity’s time with the hacker group would be enough of a problem for the team, but ARGUS’ inclusion this time around throws a monkey wrench into the dynamic, as everyone finds themselves uncomfortable with the entire situation. This also means we get a moral debate between Diggle and Lyla and it’s…fine, I guess. Arrow has gone through just about every moral high ground dilemma at this point that holding a man prison for nearly a year without due process barely registers as a blip on the radar. They both have the stances that you would expect their characters to, and while their relationship is in peril, it’s doubtful that it’ll stay that way for long.

Going back to Helix, I’ve repeatedly said how it feels like it’s taken too long for our resident hacker to realize that she’s fallen in with the wrong crowd. These guys have been giving off major sketch vibes from the very start. It also doesn’t help that for as much as she talks about wanting to do good with these guys and be more than tech support, we don’t really know anyone at Helix besides Alena. And even then, she has the same function as a quest giver in an MMO: she only exists to have nerdy banter with Felicity and then to tell her that Helix can’t do something for Team Arrow unless something else is done in return. We haven’t exactly seen these two hanging out, or sharing on a deeper level, so when Alena and Helix split from Felicity over Team Arrow baggage, it therefore doesn’t hit with the emotional weight it should.

Still, moving the plot forward is something this episode does, and quite well at that. The action scenes are all well done, the characters on hand all have something interesting and compelling to do, and the ending was genuinely surprising in its unfolding.

In the meantime, it looks like we’re in for our first bottle episode next week, and Oliver and Felicity are trapped in the Bunker with Chase!
 

Additional Notes

• Rene and Lance get to talk about Rene’s family problems. All this really amounts to is that Rene’s daughter Zoe calls Lance “Hoss,” which he hates, but I love it.
• No flashbacks this week,which was certainly interesting.
• Both Rene and Dinah have been added as series regulars for season six, and combined with Katie Cassidy coming back as Black Siren, that should be quite interesting.
• Given how the Helix boss’ face wasn’t show at all, there’s a fairly high chance that they’re the antagonists for next season.