Emiko gets a completely unsurprising ally. Oliver discovers she exists as he starts work as an SCPD consultant and Diaz gets a very surprising job offer.

Holy wow, this show feels reborn. After the increasingly grumpy trudge of last season, it’s light on its feet, incident heavy and giving its entire cast stuff to do pretty much all the time. And one plot’s set in the future!

So, Oliver first. Amell continues to be the best Batman who never lived in Gotham and gets the first of a two week sucker punch to play with this week. First off is the revelation that somehow Oliver’s folks managed to screw things up even worse than he thought possible. The scenes where he and Felicity work out who Emiko is are some of the best they’ve had all season as they try to deal with this new expansion to their family and what it means. Amell especially is getting a really nice line in long suffering, embittered acceptance and gets a chance to try that out here.

The Emiko and Rene Show is just as much fun and it’s nice to see Emiko having a far more straight ahead view of the job than her brother. ‘Find the man, kill the man, leave’ is great in principle but as she finds out no plan survives contact with the enemy. Meanwhile Rene is entirely too comfortable slipping back into vigilante mode in the present and entirely too comfortable keeping blood on his hands in the future.

I admit this is the hardest part for me. I like Rene, he’s charming, grounded and fundamentally decent. I love that he’s led the establishment of the Glades as a city but doing so as a corrupt politician whose allies may have had Felicity offed is a bit of a stretch. Not that I believe for a second she or Ollie are dead, mind you. Nonetheless I hope my dude gets a chance for redemption. Or at the very least a wig that looks less like Jeremy Renner’s American Hustle offcuts.

And then there’s the return of The Artist Formerly Known As Suicide Squad. This is a perfect way to make Diaz a regular presence without having him go full Dick Dastardly. It’s also a lovely way to create the exact sort of organic drama that last season tried so hard, and regularly, failed to do.

Verdict: This is confident, information and character heavy thriller fiction that happens to include occasional costumes and that’s a feature not a bug. Pretty much the strongest return the show could have had. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart