The season premiere of Arrow was a healthy balance between moving the story forward into the future, literally, and looking back to the past. Between some welcome villain returns, familiar story ideas, and an enhanced level of brutality in the violence, and all the pieces moving to kick the story into motion, Inmate 4587 showed off so many new conflicts with already high tensions that it would have felt equally at home in the middle of the season as it does at the beginning.
Let’s start with that montage. Oliver wakes up in prison as we presume he has already done a hundred times since the beginning of his incarceration. Right off the bat we notice he is already well on his way to growing the signature Green Arrow goatee, just with none of the smiles and good humor about him. In an impressive bit of editing, we are walked through his prison activity of eating alone, resting, thinking about his family and more shirtless bodybuilding. Typical Oliver Queen stuff. But just as we start thinking this isn’t so bad and Oliver is doing just fine, we are awakened as rudely as he is to the fact that all of it took place over one day, and the next day it starts all over again. It is a sobering moment that allows the show to bring the viewer into the mindset of its hero: there is no easy way through this. This is how things are now, and we have to accept it.
The routine is only interrupted when he gets a visit from John where he can see how difficult life on the inside is for his friend. Oliver is too proud to admit it, but John knows him well enough that he does not have to.
John provides the transition into catching up with our favorite characters in Star City. Team Arrow is officially disbanded, and its members are managing with varying degrees of success. Felicity is boring herself to death at a coffee shop, Dinah is now captain of the police force, John is head of security for A.R.G.U.S., Curtis is doing analytics and Renee is running his own gym to teach teens of the Glades (including his daughter) self defense. It hurts to see the team so fragmented, but it was a welcome relief to see them reunite so amicably. Although it does seem like rough times are ahead for Dinah and Renee’s friendship.
The addition of a new copycat Green Arrow with untold motivation and purpose was a surprisingly refreshing change of pace. The shock and mystery of the new archer brought strong echoes of season one to the forefront, and I was surprised to realize how much I missed the idea of people not knowing who the Green Arrow is. He or she fights with a bloodthirsty brutality highly reminiscent of Oliver’s early days as “the Hood,” from before John and Felicity joined the fight.
The stunt where he yanked the generic rich dudebro by the arrow in his back was as savage as it was well-executed, and it is probably safe to say the level of violence will only increase. Of course, the biggest season one callback was the penultimate scene of the episode, where we see the new Arrow cross the name of aforementioned dudebro out of a very familiar looking list.
The copycat provided a much more engaging conflict for the episode than the increasingly dull happenings of Ricardo Diaz, in particular due to the clashing perspectives of Dinah and Renee on what the right thing to do with the new Green Arrow is. But Diaz is Arrow’s worst big bad by a sizable margin. His motivations are clichéd and dull. Kirk Acevedo’s overacting would almost be funny if it had an ounce of the charisma he thinks he does, but it just makes him annoying.
His character constantly comes across as though he is struggling to prove himself worthy of being taken seriously. His invasion of Felicity and William’s apartment comes out of nowhere, and the only thing that scene provided was Felicity doing a respectable job of fighting back against him as a means of introducing her character arc for the new season. Although to the show’s credit, the mini-reunion between Oliver and Felicity was heartbreaking and while Stephen Amell and Emily Bett Rickards have both gotten really good at playing these parts, they are best when they are acting with each other.
The episode was not devoid of good villains, though. As Oliver’s time in the high security prison saw the welcome return of Michael Jai White as Bronze Tiger and Vinnie Jones as Brick. Brick is, in this critic’s opinion, the best villain Arrow ever had who did not get his own season arc. His time in season three was probably perfectly long enough that any more would have been overdoing it, but Jones is such magnetic fun in every role he plays that I was overjoyed to see him back on the show.
In this episode he provided a perfect foil for Oliver’s self-contained growth into the reality that he cannot get through his prison sentence on the path of least resistance, because he will never be able to stop his need to protect innocent people in danger. His prison yard beatdown of Brick, Sampson and Kodiak (featuring the most passively interested guards in the history of law enforcement) following the attack in the shower and on Felicity was deliciously satisfying to watch and was a perfect cap on that mini-arc Stephen Amell was given.
Finally, the “island flashbacks” of this season take the show in a direction it has never gone before. First we see an unknown man played by Ben Lewis paying a Chinese sailor for passage to Lian Yu. In the next scene he treks over to the graves of Robert Queen, Shado and Yao Fei, stopping on the former and grabbing the hosen we have seen so many times before. We are given no indication as to who this person is or why he is there, and at that point my impression was that this was season seven’s newest big bad with another personal axe to grind with Oliver Queen.
That assumption was turned on its head in the final moments of the episode, as Lewis attempts to escape from an ankle snare he pleads with his newfound captor by bringing up his relationship with his father. Surprise! It’s Roy Harper. But not the Roy Harper we know. The gray beard indicates several decades have gone by since he took off with Thea and Nyssa. This hunch is confirmed as Roy pieces together who his guest is and the episode closes.
Needless to say, I have questions. Why is Roy on Lian Yu? Where are Thea, Oliver and Felicity? Why does William need Roy? Your guess is as good as mine. But I’ll take any excuse to have Colton Haynes back on this show. It is difficult to tell what will be the most compelling plot of the truckload that were quickly dropped on us tonight, but you can count me in to be invested on almost all of them.
Overall rating: 7 out of 10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqShW5xDaxw
