Arrow: Prochnost (8x05)

If there is one character on this show that I love as much as Tommy Merlyn, it's Roy Harper. Looks like the boy is back!

Cons:

We've only got five episodes left of this show. And one of them is a backdoor pilot, and one of them is the gigantic crossover event that I really don't care about... and all I keep thinking is that there's not time to wrap everything up in a way that's going to feel satisfying to me. It also still doesn't make any sense that Oliver doesn't go and see Felicity. There is actually not a good reason for staying away at this point.

There was one moment when Mia and Oliver got captured, and someone said Oliver's name, and Mia said "how do they know who you are?" and it was such a stupid thing to do that I kept waiting for a reveal where this was all part of some bigger plan. But no, apparently Mia just didn't realize it was a bad idea to confirm her father's identity when he was keeping his mouth shut. Maybe this is a nitpick, but it really bothered me.

Diggle and Roy have a subplot that was honestly pretty boring. A standard mission where they're looking for some plutonium, and Roy has to learn to not give in to his blood lust. I loved seeing Roy, but the actual mission was very blah.

Pros:

Even if the mission was blah, it was worth it to see Roy. The basic premise here is that he's started a new life away from all of the excitement of his old persona, because he can't control his blood lust. John tells him about the future, about how he went into self-imposed exile, but that eventually he came back and realized that the way to control himself is by working with a team. It's a simple story, with a boring framing device, but I adore the fact that Roy is going to be sticking around.

Another favorite of mine? Anatoly. I honestly couldn't remember if we had left him as friend or foe, because of how often he and Oliver go back and forth between those two. But at the end of the day there's a bone-deep connection there, and it was so fun to see it one last time. He's just such a funny, interesting character, and while he inevitably reminds Oliver of some dark times in his past, he also offers Oliver the warmth of friendship, one of the few people left in his life who knew him before he'd fully become a bad-ass fighting machine, who saw him transform into the man he is today.

I liked the subplot of Anatoly and Laurel sizing each other up. It was sweet that Anatoly told Laurel she really had changed, and it was lovely to see how much that clearly meant to her. It fed nicely into that ending, where Laurel tells Lyla she's not going to go along with her lies, and Oliver and John are already there, having been filled in on the situation. I was prepared to be really impatient about Laurel lying to everyone, so I was pleased that we basically skipped over all of that and had Laurel telling the guys everything right off the bat. Of course, Lyla's in deep, here, and things are going to get worse before they get better. I'm excited to see that.

The meat of this episode is about Oliver's relationships with his children. And I really, really liked exploring that. Oliver brings Mia and William along to Russia, but once they're there, he has a hard time including them in the mission. He's worried about them and doesn't want them to get hurt, but Anatoly helps him to realize that it's more than just that. He doesn't want to share the bad parts of his past with his children. He still sees them the way he remembers them, and can't quite accept that their opinion of him might change for the worst. I love that both Mia and William get to help in the final mission, and they both get to be bad-asses about it. Oliver then promises to be more forthcoming with them about his past.

Mia and Oliver fighting together in the fight club was super cool. When they took their matching green hoods off... I had all the feels about their weird father-daughter bonding time. William got to be suave and snobby in a nice suit, which is really fun because it's so antithetical to his kind of boyish persona, but he's also really good at it so it's nice to see him take on that part of the mission and do it so well.

There's probably more I could say about this episode, but I'll leave it there. We're really closing in on the end of this show, so I'm nervous about all of the things we won't get to see before it's over. But this episode gave us Roy. It gave us Anatoly. And it gave us some great Queen Family bonding time!

8/10