‘Arrow’ Recap: Oliver Gets a Face Full of Stardust
Warning: This recap contains spoilers for the “Matter of Trust” episode of Arrow.
Tonight’s villain will be familiar to people who follow Stephen Amell’s exploits outside of Arrow — he locked horns with Cody Runnels in the WWE. While Oliver knows how to deal with that kind of problem, he’s sadly less well equipped to deal with training a team of newbies and simultaneously trying to keep Star City in one piece as mayor.
The Plot
Oliver is on the hunt for stardust, a new street drug. Wild Dog takes the initiative and attacks the stardust factory, throwing the dealer, Derek Sampson (Runnels) into a vat of chemicals. That foils the plans of district attorney Adrian Chase (Josh Segarra), who planned to get Sampson to testify. The chemicals give Sampson super-strength, and he plans to create an army of stardust-fueled monsters. Oliver needs the entire team to defeat Sampson and blow up the factory. Meanwhile, news has leaked that Thea had appointed Quentin deputy mayor, and she compounds the problem by confiding in reporter Susan Williams (Carly Pope), who immediately betrays her. Lyla visits Diggle in jail, who hallucinates that Deadshot (Michael Rowe) is in the cell with him. Lyla asks Oliver to break him out because he doesn’t want to leave.
The Flashback
Oliver wants to quit, believing the men who were executed during his initiation were innocent, but Anatoly reveals that they were all bad dudes. “You must trust process,” Anatoly tells him, and the Bratva brothers cut a deep scar into his back as the next part of that process.
Adrian Chase
Is this what Oliver Queen looks and sounds like to people outside his inner circle? Loud, shallow, take-charge? He’s a strongly anti-crime public official — and we know because we saw a picture of the character Vigilante on Felicity’s corkboard in the season premiere — who is also operating outside the law to exact justice. That describes Oliver to a T as well. It will be interesting to see how, if at all, their philosophies differ when they finally meet up in their masks.
Bratva Learnin’
The lesson Oliver is relearning through his flashbacks isn’t helping the Green Arrow side of his life at all. Maybe if he told them “You must trust process” in a Russian accent it would help? Clearly he didn’t trust, so why should they? It is helping on the mayoral side of things, though. Even though Thea has no experience, he’s trusting her to learn on the job. The real question is will that trust backfire when it comes to Quentin or will he step up and be the guy who can both save the city and win back the heart of Donna Smoak?
The Killing
It’s been three episodes now, and Oliver’s backslide into killing criminals again feels especially awful, considering that he’s teaching a whole new generation of vigilantes that it’s cool to kill criminals. At this point, he doesn’t really have much of the moral high ground on Tobias Church, who probably also thinks of himself as a guy who only kills when it’s necessary. Hopefully, Oliver realizes this soon before he becomes the Punisher in a green suit.
Quiverful of Thoughts
A slew of fun inside jokes this time, including Stardust — named after the professional wrestler who appears in this episode (Cody Runnels) as Derek Sampson — and “What kind of vigilante wears a hockey mask?” which is a reference to Casey Jones, the hockey-mask-wearing vigilante from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, played by Stephen Amell.
All the new recruits have a personality except Artemis. Can we fix that, please? Or do we have to wait for two or three seasons, like most of the female characters on the show?
Why do all new drugs make PCP look like children’s aspirin? Is there some sort of scale for how bad a drug is? Chase says stardust is a million times worse than vertigo. Is that, like, 10 million times worse than heroin? It would be helpful to know which is worse: stardust or weed or velocity 9 nuke from Robocop 2.
Could Felicity have possibly handled the Havenrock situation with Rory any worse? Sure, it’s hard to admit that you destroyed someone’s entire city to save another, but maybe tell them at a fancy dinner at least?
This episode was screened for a room full of journalists ,and everyone laughed as soon as Thea started talking to Susan because they knew she was going to stab Thea in the back. Journos may be terrible people, but at least they’re honest with themselves about it.
Arrow airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET on the CW.
