‘Arrow’ Recap: The New Black Canary and the Return of Goth Felicity?
Warning: This recap for the “Second Chances” episode of Arrow contains spoilers.
Arrow felt decidedly like The Flash this week as the team dealt with two metahumans and brought one on as a permanent addition to the team. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing for the long-term prospects of the show, this week was blast from top to bottom.
The Plot
Tina Boland (Juliana Harkavy) is a cop in Central City who acquires a sonic scream when hit by the energy wave from S.T.A.R. Labs hit her three years ago. Oliver (with Rene and Curtis) tracks her down believing that she’s the only person worthy of taking up the mantle of Black Canary. She is tracking Sean Sonus (Steve Bacic), the drug dealer who killed her partner/lover. It turns out he has sonic powers too and almost kills Oliver, Tina, and Rene. Curtis uses his sonic dampener to stop Sonus and Oliver tries to convince Tina that revenge won’t help, but she kills him anyway. Meanwhile, Felicity uses her old hacker skills to dig up a file exonerating Diggle; he’s a free man. Tina shows up in Star City and agrees to be part of Team Arrow.
Let’s Get Meta
Part of the reason The CW is able to get away with having so many comic book shows is because they’re so different; Arrow is the crime show, The Flash is the superpower show, Legends is about time travel, Supergirl is a rom-com. And while, in practical terms, adding a metahuman to the team doesn’t turn Arrow into Flash — Laurel had her Canary Cry courtesy of Cisco Ramon — it blurs the line quite a bit. Throw David/Ragman into the mix (the show makes a distinction between metahumans and magic users, which David is, but it’s just a technicality) and… well, we’ll see. The season finale may end with an awfully high body count if they decide the two shows are too similar now.
Ghost Fox Goddess
Maybe the way they plan to steer clear of Flash territory is by Felicity getting back into hacktivism. She makes a big deal about how “I haven’t done a good ol’ grab government secrets kind of hack in a really long time and it feels awesome,” and poor fashion choices aside (though, arguably, her college-era black hair is every bit as cute as her hacker handle), the Pandora data cache looks like it’s pushing both her and the show in an X-File-y, Blindspot-y direction. We may not have seen the last of Kojo (Kacey Rohl).
Inside Comics Moment
Dinah Drake (which Tina says is her real name) is the name of the original Black Canary introduced back in 1947 and a member of the Justice Society of America. She would go on to marry Larry Lance, making her Dinah Lance, but not the Dinah Laurel Lance we know. If you really want to get your head spinning, there’s a timeline where Dinah Drake Lance is actually Dinah Laurel Lance but with the mind of Dinah Drake Lance implanted in her because the real Dinah Drake Lance was stricken with cancer in the Thunderbolt Dimension. Remember that the next time you complain that modern comics are too convoluted to follow.
Quiverful of Thoughts
*Show of hands: How many people thought they’d pull a bait and switch on us and, instead of Tina, they’d somehow have Kojo (aka Felicity, Jr.) brought onto the team as the new Black Canary?
*Also, Helix is the name of a group of child supervillains in the comics continuity. Considering Kojo’s youngish demeanor and the fact that the episode’s press release referred to her as an “unknown adversary”, maybe there’s something more sinister at play here? We can only hope, because Rohl was an absolute delight for the few moments she was on screen.
*Rene starts with a triple-patty cheeseburger (in In-N-Out terms, that’s known as a 3×3). The next time they visit that diner, he gets one with five patties (a 5×5). Is there a scene where they went back one last time and he ordered, like, a 10×10? It’s hard to tell whether Ollie is disgusted or is so jealous it makes him sick (you don’t get abs like that by scarfing 5x5s all day, that’s for sure).
*Not only is this not Steve Bacic’s first DC rodeo — he played the Dark Archer on Smallville — he’s also one of a select few to play heroes in both Marvel and DC properties. He is Hank McCoy, The Beast, in X2. For the record, though his supervillain moniker is never used, Sonus is also known as Discord, one of Black Canary’s foes in the comics.
Arrow airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on The CW.
