James comes close to bankrupting the city and Olly and Team Arrow are out of options. Until Curtis and his team come to them with the truth; Vince is working the inside…

Who knew a Vince spotlight episode would be this good, huh? Beth Schwartz & Oscar Balderrama’s script clever upends your expectations again and again, telling a story that works in isolation and as part of what’s often seemed like a glacial season arc plot. By the end of it things are very different, very definitely moved along and escalated and the chances of Team Arrow all ending up on the same page any time soon are basically non existent.

Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first. The highly trained Argus agents getting killed for not reading their mission briefing at the start is ludicrous. There is some genuinely horrific Russian mobster dialogue. Oliver literally shows up at a grieving friend’s house hours after her boyfriend is murdered because of his plan to explain how this gives them ‘options’. Felicity remains weirdly and inexplicably self-centred and cruel whenever Team Newbie try to do things. Or speak. Or have ideas.

Of all those most are one-off glitches. The issue remains Team Arrow, actually no just Oliver and Felicity having no idea how to people. Olly at least shows signs of self awareness here; he doesn’t get in Dinah’s face when she goes off book and for Captain Rules Help Control The Fun that’s massive.

But. Yet again the pair of them come across as massive assholes basically every other scene. Oliver we can, just, barely, write off given his past. But the moment Felicity literally talks over some seriously important information from Dinah to re-centre the conversation on their plan and not Vince? That’s inexplicably mean, even cruel and it’s not the first time and the show is weeks overdue addressing this. Or better still writing one of its designated adults like an adult again.

That being said, the rest of the episode is great. Katie Cassidy in particular is phenomenally good despite having almost no dialogue. Quentin reaching out to ‘his’ daughter, it clearly having an effect and her still murdering VInce is one of the toughest choices this show has ever made and god damn, does it ever pay off. The image of Dinah, trapped beneath the rubble, watching a version of the woman she inherited the name from murder her boyfriend is flat out horrifying, to say nothing of the intimate and brutal way Vince is actually killed.

Top marks too to Johann Urb and Juliana Harkavy who do great work in two different time periods. Urb has sometimes seemed a little flat this season but these last couple of episodes have seen him blossom. Harkavy, meanwhile, flat out steals the show. From the elegant (and weirdly surprising) reveal of how Vince and Dinah got their abilities to the final shot the episode lives and dies on her emotional responses. That final moment, Dinah grief-stricken and murderous, is the most compelling this character has been and sets up a very personal next stage of the arc. Plus one with the urgency the rest of the Cayden James episodes have often distinctly lacked.

Verdict: This is an uneven episode but far more punches land than miss. The Team Arrow thing is becoming the biggest problem this season but if you can get past that, and you can, just, still do that this is a much needed gear change that suggests the back half of the season is going to go some very dark, very necessary places. 7/10

Alasdair Stuart