Episode Report Card Monty Ashley: B- | 36 USERS: B+ YOU GRADE IT Hero in Training
By Monty Ashley | Season 2 | Episode 2 | Aired on 10.16.2013
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Oliver's trying to work out how to be a hero, and part of that involves having a proper secret identity. He settles in as the CEO of Queen Consolidated and makes Felicity his Executive Assistant. This infuriates her, because she has a degree from MIT, and I'm pretty annoyed by it myself. But by the end of the episode, she's fetching him coffee because she's a woman and now she's basically a secretary. I will have more to say about this in the full weecap.
Oliver starts the episode at a loss for what to do, because he's no longer just hunting down the people on his father's list. But Roy Harper is getting busy at night, because FEMA trucks are being hijacked while they try to get desperately needed medical supplies to a hospital in the Glades. Unfortunately, Roy's not really good at this, because it turns out the hijacker is China White of the Triad, so Roy ends up in police custody after he flips his car over. And Alderman Blood blames Oliver for all the problems in the Glades, because his company created the earthquake machine.
So Oliver meets with Blood and proposes the same plan he always has: a charity gala, where his rich friends will all agree to help support the Glades Memorial Hospital. But wouldn't you know it? Right when the gala starts, he's called away to stop another FEMA truck hijacking. So Alderman Blood gets to make a speech about how Oliver Queen doesn't really care about Starling City, all while Oliver's out getting shot at. Does it touch your heart?
Soon, China White has been arrested and FEMA is free to send in its relief trucks to the hospital. Which I'm sure will come as a relief to them, because several of their truck drivers were murdered along the way. Oliver manages to not kill anyone, probably. He's packing a taser arrow now, which is pretty fancy! Roy swears off active crimefighting, but now he's going to report to the mysterious vigilante on the goings-on in the Glades. And back on Flashback Island, our heroes discover a cave full of Japanese skeletons with misshapen skulls.
But Oliver can't stop himself from dramatically appearing as the vigilante in the District Attorney's office to try to convince Laurel he's not a bad guy. Not only does this not work, Laurel sets up a trap! So at the end of the episode, Oliver is surrounded by about fifteen gun-toting policemen. This is quite a cliffhanger! Although he already got arrested last episode and it didn't do much.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!The opening narration now has Oliver explicitly saying, "I can't be the killer I once was. To honor my friend's memory, I must be someone else. I must be something...else." So instead of just flipping the switch to "DON'T KILL" they're going to make it an ongoing plot. Which makes sense, I guess.
Oliver is doing shirtless pull-ups and other things designed to make his muscles glisten. It doesn't have anything to do with the episode, but it's an important element of the show. He ends by jumping down from the thing he's exercising on and breaking a stick off a sparring dummy. Meanwhile, there's a FEMA truck being menaced by two motorcycles. You wouldn't think a motorcycle could menace a truck too easily, but the drivers call in for assistance, and their call is heard by Roy in his sports car. How'd Roy get a sports car? I find that weirder than him having a shortwave radio tuned to the frequency the FEMA truck uses. Conveniently enough, he's parked a few blocks farther down on the street the truck is on, so he can drive right at them. One of the motorcyclists goes flying over a couple of parked cars. He spins his car around and goes after the other one, but this guy has a machine gun. A lot of bullets are fired, but Roy's car is bulletproof, I guess. Even the windshield doesn't break. But all is not good news; he hits a pile of trash that hides one of those hidden ramps that flips cars over. I'm going to call it an A-Team Ramp. Roy's car lands upside down and he's out of the fight.
Now the van is driving toward a lady with white hair. I believe it's China White, the triad leader with the silly name and extremely terrible wig. She throws two knives through the windshield and kills both the driver and the passenger. The remaining motorcyclist takes the truck. Police pick up Roy, who insists that the "real bad guys" are getting away. They don't seem that interested in following the big white truck.
Club Verdant is hopping. Oliver is hanging out at the side of the dance floor, talking to Diggle. Because a loud club is the perfect place to have conversations. He tells Diggle he needs more sparring dummies, which sort of ties in the opening exercise scene. But he doesn't know what to do next, because he's not working off a convenient list this time out. His goal is now to fight bad guys, rather than just work through a mysterious notebook. Diggle suggests that Big Belly Burger was robbed, but he's evasive when he says that Carly had the day off. The purpose of this scene is just to establish that Diggle and Carly's relationship may have trouble, because Oliver does not do anything about the robbery and nobody every mentions it. Thea tells Oliver she didn't see him come in (he claims to have a secret entrance), and then she gets a call about Roy being arrested.