TV Review: Arrow, “The Promise” (S2/EP15) – Do We Buy Slade’s Evil Turn?

To read our other Arrow episode reviews please go here.

“Is that any way to threaten your brother?”

Airdate: 3/5/2014
Director: Glen Winter (Smallville, Arrow)
Writer(s): Jake Coburn (Arrow, Gossip Girl) & Ben Sokolowski (Arrow)

Last week, Arrow took an episode to mostly pause a moment to re-assess the show’s 3 central families (the Queens, Lances, and Team Arrow) while introducing a purely motivated villain whose skillset beautifully created an interesting conflict with Felicity. It ended with a killer cliffhanger, which we’ve had to wait a week to see pay-off but future season 2 binge-watchers will get to see immediately. So, what did happen next after Oliver returned home to find Slade Wilson meeting with his mother in the Queen Manor den?

THE PLOT RECAP -

Guess Who’s Coming to Maybe Kill Your Family -

Slade official reason for visiting is to donate to Moira’s campaign. Oliver is such a poor host that as soon as Moira is gone for a split second he attempts to stick a knife in Slade’s neck. Of course, Slade blocks the attack (he’s superhuman now, duh), and could very clearly snap Oliver’s neck then and there. Instead, he’s happy to meet Thea, who gives them all a tour of the Queen family art collection throughout the mansion.

Don’t really know if we knew this before, but Thea is a apparently huge art lover

Freaked out, Oliver calls Felicity, who, thinking he butt-dialed, places it on speaker in the Arrow Cave. Luckily, Sara is around, hears Slade’s voice, and instantly freaks the f out. She gathers Team Arrow to storm the mansion and protect Oliver and his family without, of course, Thea and Moira having a clue as to what’s happening. To them, Sara and Roy just randomly show up within seconds of each other.

With his forces gathered, Oliver politely asks Slade what he’d like to do as code for “We will kick your ass, old man”

Slade leaves cordially, probably because his own backup stops Diggle from sniping him once outside the mansion. Plus, he pulled it off – his whole, secret plan was to tour the mansion for the purpose of placing mini-cameras everywhere. Now, he can spy on a very large, mostly empty mansion, which Moira has now warned Oliver not to visit as often if he’s going to be so rude (but, wait, doesn’t he live there?).

Meanwhile, Back On the Island… -

Sara, Oliver, and still-friend Slade decide to burn the box containing the Mirakuru before taking over Ivo’s ship. Wait, burn the box? Does that sound stupid to you? It is. Anyway, Oliver creates a diversion and gets caught and taken to Ivo’s ship on purpose where he pretends to be affected by Ivo’s truth serum (Sara gave him an antidote).

Ivo falls for it, and sends all of his men to the place on the ship Oliver lied in claiming Sara and Slade were hiding

Sara and Slade then literally parachute onto the ship, Slade leaving to kill the guards, Sara to free the prisoners, and Oliver to kill Ivo. Oliver hesitates, and Ivo’s ranting about Shado is overheard by Slade, who pretty much mentally goes bye-bye, leaving just the Terminator behind. Sara and several other prisoners escape off the ship to the island, but Slade keeps Oliver as prisoner, taking over as ship captain. He cuts off the hand Ivo used to shoot Shado, and basically does the Bane from Dark Knight Rises thing – Oliver only has his permission to die once Slade has broken him physically, mentally, and spiritually. Oh, and also, Slade kept the stash of Mirakuru- that box Sara and Oliver burned was full of dirt. I told you it was stupid on their part.

THE REVIEW

In the comments section one of my earlier reviews, site reader BEFASTORDONTBE said of Arrow, “It’s easy to enjoy the show despite the plot holes when the show actually has something interesting to show you.” So, the question with “The Promise” – one of the show’s most technically accomplished episodes yet – is whether or not it was particularly interesting because boy howdy were there some serious plot holes:

Would Sara and Oliver really be so stupid as to not inspect the box containing the drugs before throwing it in a fire? At the very least, you’d think Sara wouldn’t have just blindly accepted the box from Slade without checking since she doesn’t completely trust him what with his Mirakaru-rage. Plus, what kind of box was it? Would it really burn in a fire? Did they decide against simply throwing the drugs directly into the fire for safety concerns, e.g., the resulting fumes would be dangerous to inhale or something?
So, when did Roy discover Sara was Canary?
Roy and Canary met earlier this season, but at her Queen Manor party last episode Roy didn’t seem to know Sara was Canary. However, here they are training together in the Arrow Cave before departing to help Oliver. Obviously, Roy is part of the team so of course he’d find out about Sara, but that feels like something we should have seen rather than happen off-screen.
So much rides on Slade’s love and anguish over Shado that it seems all the more glaring how relatively little they did to establish their connection prior to her death.

Actually, that last part isn’t really a plot hole; it’s just a serious storytelling problem. The plot holes I found annoying, but I could deal with them when “The Promise,” particularly the Queen Manor scenes, was so perfectly tense and suspenseful. It’s the villain’s motivation that is throwing me.

Of course, it’s not like the comic book film/TV genre is really known for giving us villains with compelling motivations. Heck, Malcolm Merlyn’s motivation last season amounted to little more than, “What part of the dead wife card aren’t you guys getting?” However, at least with a dead wife being the person motivating his villainous machinations there was an implied level of affection and intimacy. As far as the show actually depicted, Slade’s dead woman was basically his buddy’s girlfriend who nursed him for a while and used her own body to warm his own on a cold night, but in a non-sexual way. Now, all in her name he is carrying out a plan he started 5 years ago to figuratively burn everything Oliver loves to the ground, salting the Earth to ensure it never regrows. This is a seriously disproportionate response, and I’m not willing to just give it a completely free pass because the Mirakuru has somehow warped Slade’s mind.

It reminds me of the Seinfeld episode (“The Fatigues,” season 8) where Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) keeps promoting rather than firing a morbid, army fatigue-wearing, deep-voiced employee:

Later on, Elaine asks him what the heck is really up with his army fatigues and psychotic imagery only for him to surprisingly respond, “I went out with this woman on a couple of dates. I thought she really liked me, and then things kind of cooled off.” She gives him a spot-on “WTF!” face before asking, “That’s it?”

For me, Slade Wilson has the “That’s it?” of villain motivations, which would be fine if he was a villain of the week, but as the big bad of season 2 it kind of undermines quite a bit of what has gone down this season. Which is interesting to me, considering that “The Promise” finally delved into Dr. Ivo’s (the continually fantastic Dylan Neal) motivation. It’s pretty much what we’d guess – he’s doing all of this to save a sick wife, whose is either 100% passive-aggressive with him on the phone, or (more likely) has a condition which impairs her memory. That I can buy just as I could better buy Slade’s anguish over Shado if they’d done more to establish those two. That relationship is now the centerpiece of the villain’s plans, yet any intimacy between the two prior to her death was crucially left mostly implied rather than outright stated.

Which is all a shame because if you ignore all of that (or if you’re cool with Slade’s motivations) ”The Promise” was a truly stellar episode. The concept of the villain revealing him or herself at the hero’s home was played for brilliant tension when Glory did it on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but here Arrow took it to a whole new level by stretching out Slade Wilson’s housecall to last the entire episode as opposed to a single scene. Granted, with this type of scenario where every line of dialog for the hero and villain carries a hidden meaning you can possibly amuse yourself with wondering something like, “How did Thea not pick up on the obvious tension between those two?” or what must Moira have thought when Slade told Oliver he doesn’t believe in moving on after a loved one dies. However, the way everything in Queen Manor was staged (directed/edited/choreographed/acted) was fantastic, particularly the way in which Roy, Oliver, and Sara had effectively circled Slade by the end.

In fact, there seemed to be something slightly different to the directing and cinematography in “The Promise,” with the lighting in Queen Manor and more tight shots than normal brilliantly creating a claustrophobic atmosphere. As a result, not a single punch was thrown but when Team Arrow converged on Slade in full force it was a heroic, Rah Rah sight to behold.

The action sequences on the freighter were uniformly impressive, and Deathstroke in action was truly full-on Terminator. This was a very flashback-heavy episode in general, but it was mostly us getting to see stuff prior episodes had already told us would happen, with some slight new twists (Sara back on the island with other escapees, Oliver left on the freighter with Slade). The moment Slade discovered the truth about Oliver picking Sara over Shado was beyond crucial. However, even then the present day material is what best held my attention as it presented more immediate tension, albeit tension periodically informed and enhanced by Slade’s deteriorating mental state in the flashbacks.

THE BOTTOM LINE

“The Promise” was one of Arrow‘s most tense, action/flashback-heavy episodes to date, particularly of season 2. It changed things up with the character pairings and settings in the flashbacks, which is the show’s least compelling element. It, arguably, didn’t really accomplish nearly as much in the present, but damn was it well-executed, Amell’s unease around Slade in Queen Manor until Sara and Roy showed up being a real standout. As per the episode title, now that Slade has made his most public move yet in the present the show is promising us some crazy cool ramp-up between Team Arrow and Slade from this point forward until their inevitable climactic battle, presumably at season’s end. Of course, like “The Promise,” there will probably yet more plot holes, and character motivations which give us pause. However, also like “The Promise” then something will blow up real nice, Amell will blow us away with how he plays a scene, whichever romantic pairing we favor will have a nice moment, and we’ll just have to go with it.

THE NOTES

Thomas Flynn and Sara Lance

1. I was positive the priest/preacher with his own Mr. Jingles-esque (from the Green Mile) pet mouse was a comic book character. For one thing, it seems like almost every random side character on Arrow has some comic book origin. For another, they made a point of highlighting him as semi-significant new island character. However, his name is Thomas Flynn, and I can find no trace of a DC comic book character with that name.

2. I previously argued, “Am I the only one who finds it kind of funny every time someone on this show utters the word ‘Mirakuru‘? They’re taking it so seriously when the word literally translates to “The Miracle,” and is clearly a bogus comic book miracle drug that gives people superhuman powers.” So, I was particularly amused this week when Oliver just cut through the BS and called it “a miracle drug” in the island flashbacks.

3. Slade is asked by Moira if he has a wife or any children, and he indicates he doesn’t. Things may have changed since then (or he could be lying), but hadn’t he mentioned having a wife and child during island flashbacks with Oliver?

4. When Sara descended down the stairs at Queen Manor I initially misread Slade’s reaction to mean that he did not know she was still alive until that point. Of course, he knew – he just hadn’t actually seen her yet. He clearly seemed like he wanted to rip her throat out on the spot.

What did you think? Like “The Promise”? Hate it? Love it? Let us know in the comments section.