TV Review: ‘Arrow: Blind Spot’

After a pretty lackluster episode last week, ‘Arrow’ returns with a much more interesting episode that brought some ancillary characters into the spotlight. In fact, those supporting character storylines might have actually outshined whatever Oliver, Laurel, and Brother Blood were doing.

In this week’s episode, Arrow joins Laurel’s crusade against Sebastian Blood, who she has discovered to be more than Starling City’s favorite son. The only problem is that she doesn’t have the necessary evidence to prove it. That’s why she enlists the vigilante to help her find some while Blood and Slade work hard to cover their tracks and discredit Miss Lance as much as they possibly can. Meanwhile, with his newfound powers beginning to manifest, Roy Harper and Sin go into the hero business for themselves, but they soon realize that they’re in way over their heads when Thea Queen’s main squeeze goes a little too far.

Even though this episode was lacking some Slade, which I was expecting considering that he showed up in last week’s preview, there were still a lot of great things about this episode. I really liked how Ollie has been manipulated by his enemies to practically cut off Laurel entirely. By the end of the episode, he’s in a completely different place with her and that should come into play as the story progresses. With both Oliver Queen and the Arrow right where they want him, Slade and Blood have our hero in a very vulnerable situation and I can’t wait to see how they exploit it.

Speaking of Laurel, I’m glad that the pill popping finally caught up to her. This plus the fallout from it are other things that should have some interesting effects in the long run. Now that she’s no longer in a position of power and at her lowest point with everyone she cares about, I’m pretty curious to see how she’ll come back from it all.

However, while there were interesting things involving Laurel Lance in this episode, there were also some questionable things as well. For instance, she was working for the D.A.’s office, yet she needed the Arrow to break into the archives for her. Why couldn’t she just go in and get clearance herself and avoid the pointless and predictable B&E sequence. Sure, they probably needed a reason for Ollie and Laurel to interact so that the ending of the episode was more powerful, but they could have done it without the plot hole.

Finally, by far my favorite part of the episode was Roy’s adventure into vigilantism. First of all, the scene where he asks Thea to help Sin find something slutty for a date was hilarious, but business really picked up when Roy and Sin headed out to the Glades to take out their first adversary. While writing suffered elsewhere in this episode, they didn’t miss a beat when it came to this storyline. I loved the sequence where Roy goes a bit too far and comes to realize it. Everything surrounding this part of the episode was just fun and interesting to watch. After all, who doesn’t love an origin story? It’ll be even better when we get Roy and Ollie together next week.

Overall, this episode of ‘Arrow’ was much better than the one we came back from the hiatus with. The episode before this was forgettable, but this one has been upgraded to okay. Maybe even good. But like I mentioned before, an okay episode of this show is way better than 60% of the crap they put on TV these days. I just hope that we got some satisfying payoffs to the setups from this episode, otherwise it might only end up being better than 50% of what’s on TV right now.

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‘Arrow’ starring Stephen Amell, David Ramsey, Emily Bett Rickards, Katie Cassidy, and Manu Bennett airs every Wednesday at 8:00pm on The CW.