Oliver discovers who the Demon is. Felicity, Laurel and Dinah fight crime. Curtis has a dark night of the soul.

I have no idea what changed between last year and this, between I’m glad it did. Arrow season 6 was frequently dull, plodding and dour. This year, everyone and everything feels new, refreshed and interesting. And, with the exception of Rene (who did get a lot to do last week to be fair), we get new looks at everyone.

Let’s start, oddly, with Curtis. Mr Terrific has been a backseat player for a while now and this episode gives him a chance to get back in the game. A chance, brilliantly, he wants absolutely nothing to do with. Curtis has consistently got some of the worst breaks of Team Arrow and Echo Kellum expresses them all here with articulate, funny, grief and rage. Curtis has lost his husband, his job, briefly his freedom and has been beaten senseless more than once. Why the hell would he want to go back in the field?

As John points out, because he’s Mr Terrific. Curtis, like Oliver, finds the heroic mantle sits a little too heavily. And, like Oliver, he finds a way to carry that weight this week. it’s subtle stuff, made all the more impressive by giving David Ramsey and Echo Kellum a chance to bounce off one another.

But the episode is just as fun, and nuanced, everywhere else. Felicity, Dinah and Laurel have rarely been more fun than they are here. The situation simultaneously calls on all their skills and demands they all grow. Dinah has to work outside the law, Laurel has to work inside it and Felicity finds a system she can’t hack. Together, the three still do some real good and seeing Laurel in particular react to that is surprisingly powerful. The show is redeeming a character in near real time and making it work at every level, I especially liked her grumbling about how at least Black Siren got results. The road to the light is uphill and winding, but Laurel is definitively on it now.

And speaking of the path to the light, this week we not only get a welcome return for Talia but some tangible emotional growth for everyone’s favorite Queen son. Oh and a lovely namecheck to Gotham and Talia’s ‘old adversary’ there. Faced with his old teacher and foe, Oliver is endlessly, completely honest. She was wrong, he did damage as a result of her teachings, he’s sincerely grief stricken that he had to kill her father. There’s no front to Oliver, no schemes. Prison has pared him down to his core and the serenity and authority that gives him is the most interesting the character has ever been. Look at the end sequence where he covers Talia’s escape, and how she reacts. Oliver Queen is becoming the man he always thought he was and, given that he seems likely to escape in two weeks (the episode is called ‘The Slabside Redemption’), Diaz is in more trouble than he can possibly imagine.

The good guys win. They have to sweat and work to do it but they win and it’s such a clear victory that it’s actually kind of startling. Arrow is a show that deals in shades of grey most of the time so it’s massively satisfying to see that change here, for so many characters.

Verdict: A great standalone episode, and a great continuation of what is starting to look like one of the show’s strongest seasons. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart