Episode Report Card Monty Ashley: B | 28 USERS: B+ YOU GRADE IT Reign of Blood
By Monty Ashley | Season 2 | Episode 11 | Aired on 01.22.2014
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.When the last episode left off, Laurel Lance had met Maya Resik, Sebastian Blood's mother, who's been locked away in an insane asylum. Blood picks things up by going to visit Maya… and then killing her by giving her a heart attack. This leads to Laurel telling her boss (Assistant District Attorney Adam) that Blood is evil and must be stopped, but he doesn't believe her. So there's only one thing for her to do: she has to reach out to The Arrow.
Her request for help comes at a good time, because Oliver's not getting anywhere by interrogating random thugs for information about the man in the skull mask. Laurel provides a pretty thick file of evidence that Blood was connected to Cyrus Gold, but Oliver chooses to start the investigation with the juicy father-murdering. He wants to take a look at the files for the initial investigation, but they were never digitized. So he needs to break into the old file room, but to do that, he needs to enlist the help of Laurel. It seems like she could have rounded up this evidence herself as someone in the DA's office, but instead they stage a complicated break-in. It goes wrong immediately, and Oliver has to jump out of a second-floor window with the police on his heels. And then they find out that the evidence folder is empty, so someone's pulling a cover-up!
By this point, Slade has found out that Laurel is making trouble, so he orders Blood to take care of it. The police raid Laurel's apartment and find her stolen prescription pills. This is an interesting wrinkle, because they're not framing her; she really has been stealing her father's medication. But we're still supposed to feel bad for her because now everyone thinks she's a crazy drug addict and they won't take her seriously when she accuses Sebastian Blood of murder. She's arrested and sent home, and then she's kidnapped by Blood's men. There's a message sending the Arrow to the Starling Cannery, so Oliver's able to deal with it pretty quickly. When he gets there, he distracts the man in the skull mask long enough for Laurel to grab a gun and shoot him several times. Take that, Mr. Skull Face! But it turns out to be Officer Daily, so now everyone believes that Sebastian Blood is definitely innocent. Slade still kills a few goons to show how angry he is.
Meanwhile, Roy Harper has decided to do something with his new super-strength. He recruits Sin to pose as a hooker so he can get some vigilante action in on the Starling Slasher. And it goes perfectly until he almost kills the Slasher, so he has to call an ambulance. That seems like it would harsh your vigilante buzz, right? Oliver finds out (because he finds out everything) and, as The Arrow, offers to train Roy in controlling his new powers.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!It's raining at Saint Walker's Hospital as Sebastian Blood walks in. A nurse delivers the exposition that he's an Alderman (we already knew that) and he's here to see his aunt (which I already assumed, although we learned in the last episode that she's not his aunt.) He's left alone with her, and he snarks at her rosary beads before asking what Laurel Lance talked to her about. Maya says she told Laurel about Sebastian killing his father, but now she's sorry. I feel like "I'm sorry" is probably not going to be good enough. He claims to forgive her, calls her "Mama," and walks out. That could have gone worse! Maya lies back on her bed, praying. And then Blood's back in her room with his silly skull mask on, so it does, in fact, go worse.
Elsewhere, Oliver is still demanding to know who the guy in the skull mask is. In this case, he's shooting arrows past an entertainingly twitchy dude, who is standing between some giant gears. This is a neat set, and they're wasting it on this throwaway scene. I like the twitchy guy, too, although he doesn't get to do anything but say he doesn't know what Oliver is talking about. Felicity is listening in, and she's using an audio polygraph to report that Twitchy is telling the truth. That's dumb! But it's dumb in a fun, goofy way, so I approve.
Flashback Island. Sara and Oliver are holed up in the crashed plane, which looks bigger than it used to. They're looking for Slade, but he's gone. And he's presumably got much better jungle survival skills than either of them, so I don't think they have much of a chance of finding him. Oliver says the sensor grid is still up, so they'll know if Ivo's men arrive to kill them. Sara wants to just give the Mirakuru to Ivo, and Oliver is theatrically disbelieving that she'd even consider this. Sara says Ivo isn't evil, which is obviously untrue even if he taught her things while he was on the ship. He kept people in cages and tortured them!
Back to the present. Laurel goes to her desk in the DA's office and starts to take a pill. She should consider indulging her addiction somewhere other than the office. It also might not be a bad idea to take the pills out of that bottle with someone else's name on it. Downey of Saint Walker's Hospital calls to tell her that Maya Resik's heart gave out. So I guess Blood scared her to death? He's already suspiciously similar to the Scarecrow, so I think he should avoid that tactic.
When the exposition phone call is over, Laurel goes to talk to Adam (her boss, the Assistant District Attorney) to try to convince him that Sebastian Blood is evil and must be stopped. He doesn't believe her, because she sounds crazy. She demands a search warrant to investigate Blood's home, but he points out that he's the ADA that took Vertigo on live TV, so he doesn't have that much latitude for arbitrarily investigating Aldermen. She's on her own.