Jumping right in, this week’s episode of ‘Arrow,’ titled ‘Fundamentals,’ was all about bringing Oliver down to his lowest for the season, and doing a kind of reboot for the character and the hero so he can start to rebuild his crime-fighting career and figure out where everything went wrong (and why everyone on the team, including his partner of 6 years, has left him). The show did a similar episode last year, and while I am not a fan of these kinds of parallel episodes year after year, episodes like this are enjoyable for showcasing the acting abilities of Stephen Amell and giving us a bit of a breather between massive action set-pieces when he does have a big team around him and everyone is fighting.
The episode opens with a flash forward of Oliver in his old HOOD costume making his way through the SCPD station, clearly a man on a mission, toward a room full of armed cops surrounding Diaz, who is clearly lying in wait, muttering about how predictable Oliver is. We then flash to “10 hours earlier” in the Mayor’s office with Oliver and Quentin and a city official, with more talk about Oliver’s impending impeachment, which Felicity is busy searching for evidence to help Oliver with. The man says things do not look good for Oliver but promises to be fair and ending the meeting by shaking Oliver’s hand.
Meanwhile, back at HQ, Felicity has discovered a glitch in the SCPD security feed system which occurs every night at 10pm. She and Oliver deduce that this is the time that Diaz himself must go in to speak to the police officers he controls, and Oliver thinks that is when he should go in to take Diaz down. Felicity is completely against the plan calling it a suicide mission as Oliver is alone (though I feel like we’ve seen him similar tasks against worse odds before…). She says he should ask Diggle to help, who conveniently enough has just arrived at HQ, and we get a brief Quiver Crew reunion. Sadly enough, Dig is not there to reconcile. He was tricked by Felicity, ‘Parent Trap’ style, to come over in the hopes that he and Oliver could talk and works things out, but their heated (and rather petty) argument proves to her that they are not going to be working together any time soon. Fortunately for Oliver, Felicity does find evidence proving the DA and the Police Chief were on Diaz’s payroll. Unfortunately, she does not have time to fake a trail to explain how Oliver would have come up with this evidence, meaning if he uses it, the City Council would realize the only way he could have gotten it would be from the Green Arrow (because the City Council knows the Green Arrow is a hacker? And/or because there are no other hackers in Star City that Oliver could be working with? This plot point confuses me.) (Continued on next page)
