Arrow: “The Odyssey”

There’s no point talking around it: “The Odyssey” takes the big confrontation from the end of last week’s episode and postpones it indefinitely. Oliver has taken Moira off his list of suspects, while the blood sample that could have incriminated him has been destroyed with a wave of Felicity Smoak’s magic, computerized wand. At first glance, this all feels dangerously close to Arrow pushing the reset button, but that isn’t really the case. After all, Felicity now knows Oliver’s secret and agrees to join the team, albeit on a temporary basis—or, at least, that’s what she says now. And, on a more fundamental level, Oliver’s refusal to investigate his mother further isn’t simply a bit of narrative convenience. Diggle’s warnings make it clear that Oliver still isn’t thinking straight when it comes to his mother’s potential involvement in the mysterious undertaking. He’s making a big mistake, one that likely will end in a whole lot of damage and bloodshed by season’s end. Delaying the payoff like this is the kind of trick that can really only work once, or else it seems like the show is too craven to follow through on its own setup, but “The Odyssey” spins one hell of an episode out of making the weaker dramatic choice. This episode is the one time that trick can work, and it works with aplomb.
In fairness, it’s a little difficult to call an episode cowardly when it opens with Moira shooting her own son. That opening scene functions as an effective illustration of the larger conundrum Oliver faces. He isn’t really wrong when he points out to Diggle that Moira is the first person that the Hood went after who begged for her life for what are theoretically selfless reasons. There’s obviously no way Oliver can keep his act up when Moira is invoking his own name as a reason not to hurt her, but it’s possible that Oliver might have also thought twice if, say, Frank Bertinelli had asked him to think of Helena (or, to really press the point, if some other criminal had begged the Hood to think of a family member of theirs who Oliver didn’t happen to be having sex with). Moira doesn’t react like all the other hardened criminals Oliver has dealt with before, and the episode leaves it ambiguous just why that is. There’s no question that she’s not an entirely willing participant in Malcolm’s schemes—Walter is still missing, after all—but she’s always shown a flair for self-serving rationalizations. And it’s not as though she hesitated to fire her gun the instant the Hood let down his guard.
Of course, all that is merely prelude to the episode’s main plot, which shifts the focus back five years to Oliver and Slade Wilson’s big escape attempt. The island flashbacks have never really been a strength for the show, if only because they have never been allowed enough time in any given episode to add up to something substantial. Here, the bulk of the episode is devoted to the beginning of Oliver’s transformation into the Hood, as Slade Wilson eventually accepts Oliver as a fellow soldier who could help keep him alive. Oliver’s actions here suggest that we’re witnessing the mirror image of his arc in the present day; when given the opportunity to kill one of Fyers’ men, he refuses, instead opting to knock out the henchman. To survive on the island, Oliver is slowly but surely beginning to sacrifice his humanity, something he will only reclaim when he finally gets back to Starling City.
Compared to the cold-blooded killer of Arrow’s early episodes—and Felicity and Diggle’s conversation tonight makes it pretty clear that the Hood still kills, at least on occasion—this is a version of Oliver closer to what’s generally considered conventional superhero morality, as he tolerates Slade Wilson’s willingness to kill but can’t bring himself to do likewise. Stephen Amell does a nice job of conveying Oliver’s growing competence in combat, from his amateurish displays early on against Wilson to his clumsy, briefly effective bout with the air traffic controller to the surprisingly brutal takedown of the henchman in front of the injured Wilson. It’s a quick transition, admittedly, but Amell is able to at least sell that there has been a transition, and show how Oliver could make the fundamental breakthrough that would set him on the path to become the Hood.