Episode Report Card Monty Ashley: B | 2 USERS: B+ YOU GRADE IT Star-Crossbowed Lovers
By Monty Ashley | Season 1 | Episode 17 | Aired on 03.20.2013
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.There are a lot of new sets tonight! So when Laurel Lance brings her mother to meet with her father, it's in an entirely new cafe, rather than that one hamburger joint everyone goes to. She wants him to investigate the theory that Sarah Lance is still alive, but he's resistant. Until the end of the episode, when he's on board.
Another new set is Club Verdant, which is the name of the nightclub that Oliver and Tommy have been supposedly working on this whole time. It's done! And its opening night is a huge success, featuring a guest DJ I've never heard of. To be fair, I haven't heard of a lot of club DJs. Neither Tommy and Oliver seem to enjoy it much, though. Tommy's still cranky that his pal Oliver has turned out to be a murdering vigilante and never told him. And Oliver's distracted because Helena Bertinelli is back in town. Which you should have known from the title "The Huntress Returns." You could pay a little attention, you know?
Helena's here because her father (Frank Bertinelli, noted mobster) is about to cut a deal with the feds and get witness protection. She cannot allow that, so she wants to murder him. But she can't find him, so she threatens Oliver's friends until he agrees to help out. They start out by following two vans, because Oliver allegedly knows that one of them is transferring her father. They never explain how Oliver got this information, and it's a police sting anyway. Helena gets arrested, and Oliver has to break her out of the interrogation room. It's possible that he sets the police station on fire. He certainly shoots a dart into Detective Lance's neck.
Next, Helena finds Felicity Smoak and makes her hack into the FBI database to find the safe house where her father is being kept. She kills a good half-dozen police officers while breaking in, but Oliver stops her before she can kill her father, the mob boss. Then McKenna Hall (Oliver's current girlfriend, and also the officer trying to track down the vigilante) surprises them and gets shot by Helena. McKenna's alive, but her femur is shattered, so she moves away to Coast City. So much for her!
Also Thea Queen offers Roy Harper a job at Verdant, which he accepts but doesn't show up for. Then he saves her from some goons but gets stabbed. Then he's afraid of needles so Thea kisses him to distract him. This is probably building to something.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!Oliver claims in the voiceover that when he was on the island, he had one goal: survive. I disagree. He clearly had other goals, like "get awesome at pull-ups" and "get awesome at archery." It's not like the flashbacks only ever show him breathing and eating. He's well past that on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Okay, on with the actual show. We start in a strip club, but it's the kind of strip club where the ladies don't actually strip, because it's on the CW. A sleazy guy gets offered a lap dance from a young lady in kind of a nun-themed bustier. It's Helena Bertinelli! You don't need me to remind you that she's the Huntress in the comic books, nor that she was Oliver's girlfriend for about two episodes. And, of course, you remember that they had a disagreement about how many murders is too many, because Helena likes to kill the bad guy, whereas Oliver prefers to show restraint in the form of killing all the bad guy's henchmen before letting the police drag the bad guy off to jail. But did you remember that Helena's father, Frank Bertinelli, was the head of the Starling City mafia, which Helena dedicated herself to taking down?
Okay, sorry. I got a little hung up on exposition there. I promise it was easier to do it that way than to recap the ways the show worked the backstory into dialogue. This creepy guy that Helena is talking to is Gus, her father's attorney. She lures him into the back room for a private dance, and then she threatens him with a teeny crossbow. Gus claims he doesn't know where Frank is so she shoots him dead. She goes out to her motorcycle, for which she is not really dressed adequately. I mean, she's got boots and a helmet, but other than that she's got a trench coat over lingerie.
The next scene is in a fancy new nightclub. It's Oliver's new place! They finally turned the warehouse into a club. Entirely between episodes! McKenna and Oliver are excited that Steve Aoki is going to DJ, so now I have to find out who Steve Aoki is. The Internet reports that he's Devon Aoki's brother! Also he's a DJ of some sort, which I guess the show already told us. Also, his father invented Benihana. Now you know as much as I do. Oliver asks McKenna to be his date to the club opening, and she kisses him.
A cafe somewhere. This episode is popping with new sets! Normally, they'd be at Big Belly Burger any time a character needed to eat something. Detective Lance is meeting his daughter Laurel there and he apologizes for using her to try to catch the archer. And Laurel also apologizes -- because she brought her mother Dinah! It's Alex Kingston! And she believes Sarah Lance is still alive! If you don't remember that Sarah Lance supposedly died in the shipwreck, you should really just go back and get caught up on the whole series. There's only so much hand-holding I'm prepared to do here. Detective Lance is thrown by Dinah's appearance. She's got a chart of all of the deserted islands in the area of Oliver's island. And she also has a picture that "a tourist" took of someone that looks just like Sarah. She insists that their daughter is a survivor. Isn't it a little mean to call Sarah "our daughter" when Laurel's right there? Detective Lance insists that Sarah's dead. And then he leaves. I want to know what tourist took this picture and where it was taken.