Arrow Season 3 Premiere Review: One Flew Over the Side of a Roof

Arrow S03E01: "The Calm"

As Arrow wrapped up its second season, it also wrapped up the arc that centered on Oliver's journey from vigilante to hero, from a killer striking off names in a notebook to a savior of Starling City who tried not to use lethal force if at all possible. By letting Slade live, Oliver believed he'd successfully completed that transition. And as we kick off Season 3, it appears as though he has. Crime is down and Quentin—having survived his injuries and even been promoted!—has declared the Arrow a friend to the city, going so far as to dismantle the anti-vigilante task force once charged with hunting the hooded crusader.

So begins the next chapter in Oliver's journey. Now, he faces the question of whether or not he can be Oliver Queen AND the Arrow without one or the other taking up too much space in his life; not only does he hope to regain control of Queen Consolidated, he's ready to woo Felicity, too.

Yes, it finally happened: Oliver and Felicity went out on a date! And given the romantic tension that Arrow has built up for a season and half, it was a well-earned moment, serving to scratch a particular romantic itch for many viewers as well as to give Oliver some more depth. He's opening up to Felicity in a way that he hasn't opened up to anyone since the show began. He's realizing that he should try to preserve a bit of his soul and humanity, that people are people and not "threats" or "targets." And Felicity is the reason he's come to understand that.

This is a very big moment for Oliver. He's letting his guard down and talking about his feelings and his past. He's not being cryptic and unnecessarily mysterious; instead, he's behaving very much like a man who's suffered a great deal of trauma and only now feels comfortable discussing it, and at a time when he feels safe and feels that what he needs to protect is safe. It may've been a frustratingly long wait for those fans who just wanted to see these two kids get together, or for those who were eager for Oliver to start growing as a character, but I think that both the scene and Amell's performance in it were well worth the wait. Even more than the confrontation with Slade, it felt like the climax of the past two seasons' worth of storytelling.

So of course the show had to go and blow it all up, and with a rocket launcher no less. Peter Stormare makes for an excellent heir to Seth Gable's Count Vertigo mantle—not that there was any doubt about this, since Stormare is a master at chewing the scenery. Stormare's Vertigo, named Werner Zytle after the New 52 version of the character, even mixed some fear toxin into the drug to complete the melding of the Scarecrow gimmick and the Joker attitude that Arrow started with Gable's incarnation. Hopefully Stormare's Vertigo won't be gone for too long.

The fear toxin add-on also allowed for Oliver to actually fight himself, in a showdown between Oliver Queen and the Arrow, to properly dramatize the episode's central tension for Oliver. It was rightfully symbolic, and allowed the show to use its fondness for fight scenes set in atmospherically/poorly lit warehouses to make sure Amell and his stunt double could really get into it. Yes, the dimness of the room certainly added to a potential psychological element—it was like Oliver was fighting himself in the recesses of his mind!—but I've grown tired of Arrow's tendency to conceal fight choreography with shadows and editing. Even the final confrontation with the count outside the sports arena was mostly lit from below, with a camera craning around them. I know the cast and crew puts a lot of work into staging these fights, and every once in a while, I'd like to be able to see one without the mood lighting and choppy editing intended to make it "exciting."

Zytle's attack during Oliver and Felicity's date was narratively and thematically sound, even down to Oliver interpreting a tracker being planted on him as a loss of focus. It reinforced the idea that Oliver, despite his apparent desire to move on from his traumas—or at least to actually start talking about them and dealing with them as Oliver Queen—will take any excuse to address them by fighting crime and keeping those closest to him still at arm's length instead.

It doesn't help that Oliver ended up failing a second time as Oliver Queen when Ray Palmer (Brandon Routh) swooped in with his helicopter ("You guys validate, right?"), his fancy hacking skills, and his super-cool presentation to practically walk away with Queen Consolidated. Again, Oliver saw this failure as just more evidence for him not to be Oliver Queen, or at least not the Oliver Queen that he thinks he needs to be and, frankly, probably should be. His speech to the board wasn't even connected to a vision for the company; it was connected to an idea of the past, an appeal to a legacy. Even when Oliver thinks he's ready to move forward, he's still looking back, and sometimes not in the most productive ways.

But what a breath of fresh air Routh's Ray Palmer is! Obviously the character was conceived in no small part as a complement to Emily Bett Rickards' take on Felicity, and to give her an actor and a character with the same energies to interact with. I've never felt as if Felicity doesn't belong, but Arrow's other characters aren't wired in the same way that she is, and it's great that Routh's Ray brings in a more confident version of that energy, with the same patter and sense of quick-thinking.

To top things off, Arrow now has a much-needed foil for Amell's restrained, purposefully stiff portrayal of Oliver (even as the show provides Amell with an opportunity to loosen Oliver up a bit: "Everybody likes Italian"). While Routh provides an energetic counterpoint to Amell, Ray is the corporate counterpoint to Oliver, right down to his plan for for Queen Consolidated to save Starling City—in no small part through an effort to rebrand the place as Star City. At the very least, the idea will likely delight comic book fans everywhere, since it was always supposed to be Star City, dammit.

However, much to the dismay of many viewers—including me—is the apparent/likely/I'm-going-to-guess-this one-is-sticking murder of Sara. This was a biiiiiiiig surprise, one I wasn't expecting this soon. Sara's death was necessary to properly push Laurel down the path of taking up the blonde wig and leather jacket. She needs a reason to become the Canary—and revenge, as Oliver can attest, is a damn fine reason to start training. But it certainly was sudden.

As I type, I'm sure there's already groaning across the comments and the internet that the wrong Lance sister got her stomach pumped full of arrows and then fell off a roof (seriously, folks, I think she's actually gonna stay dead this time)—and that, worse still, she died in part to further Laurel's character development. It's just like when Tommy took some rebar to the chest to give Laurel an arc in Season 2. I've enjoyed having Sara and Caity Lotz on Arrow, so I'm sad to see the present-day version of her go (I'm sure she'll pop up in flashbacks). But I'm not upset about it, so long as the writers handle Laurel's development due to this event with more finesse than they handled it last season; while it was a nice idea, it was executed in a decidedly slipshod way.

Annoyed or not, Sara's murder is the opening salvo in what will likely/hopefully be Season 3's big story. I'm hopeful, because I want Arrow to back away from large scale assault on the city in favor of something a little less grand. Slade's plan was deeply personal on a big canvas; I'd like to see something more intimate this time around, and figuring out who killed Sara and why feels very much like an opportunity to experience that in Season 3.

FROM THE QUIVER

– Roy's new duds look better on screen than they did in the promotional picture released over the summer, but that's largely because we didn't have a lot of time to study them, which prevented me from thinking about how he's going to snag all that lacing on something.

– The Hong Kong flashbacks have begun. I'm hoping that Arrow's time in Hong Kong will be better than its time on Lian Yu, and with more forward momentum, as the Lian Yu scenes often felt like the show was just padding its runtime.

– I appreciated the show's acknowledgment that Starling City's population is dwindling after suffering two major terrorist attacks in as many years. For a show that's careful to maintain a sense of realism, like using the mirakuru to help pave the way for Barry Allen becoming the Flash, it's nice to see that kind of cause-and-effect factoring into the plot.

– The identity crisis issue isn't just limited to Oliver, by the way. Quentin is dealing with no longer being in the field by, well, going into the field and taking painkillers in the same way that I tend to eat Sour Patch Kids. Likewise, Diggle has a new frontier to explore with Lyla and the baby, and the question of what his role on Team Arrow is going to be. The only other person aside from Laurel who seems comfortable with everything is Roy, who's likely happy just to have a purpose.

– "Lyla has me building the bassinet from hell."

– "Usually I'm the one talking in sentence fragments."

– "Alcohol is not going to mix well with those two benzos I took."

– "Some things never die. You for example. It's frustrating."

What did you think of Arrow's Season 3 premiere?