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- Airdate: 3/19/2014
- Director: Larry Teng (Medium, Person of Interest, Elementary, NCIS)
- Writer(s): Keto Shimizu (The Cape, Being Human, Arrow’s “Blast Radius” & “Broken Dolls”) & Bryan Q. Miller (Smallville)
Last week, Arrow took an episode to go all Hitchcock at Queen Mansion and radically changed up the status quo on the Island. So, now would be a great time to do a Diggle-centric Mission Impossible/Dirty Dozen thing sans Oliver, right? Right?
THE RECAP -
Welcome to the Suicide Squad -
Diggle’s ex-wife/current girlfriend Lyla beckons and he comes running, thinking she needs his help when in reality it was just a very enticing “I just got back from a long mission” booty call. As if sensing there was joy somewhere in the world for her to stamp out, Amanda Waller shows up to order both of them into a mission.
Diggle: “You know, I don’t actually work for ARGUS. I’m not really your’s to just boss around.”
Waller: “It’s cute that you think that.”
The gist: when Diggle and Lyla served together in Afghanistan, he saved Gholem Qadir, a terrorist later released after providing considerable intelligence information. Now, the publicly reformed rat bastard is privately stockpiling a deadly nerve agent to be sold to the highest bidder. Waller can’t officially do anything about it, but an off-the-books special ops team led by Diggle and Lyla could. Their soldiers? Incarcerated super criminals working as mercenaries in return for commuted sentences. Welcome to the Suicide Squad: Deadshot, Bronze Tiger, Shrapnel. Don’t worry, though – if any one of them steps out line it’s death by remotely triggered bomb implanted in their head.
And, just like that, the honeymoon phase of Diggle and Lyla’s renewed relationship is over, the two taking opposing ethical viewpoints on the whole Suicide Squad proposition. He goes along with it, though. The Squad fakes an assassination attempt to get Diggle an invite to Quadir’s mansion with the nerve agent. It works, but Shrapnel makes a getaway, spouting some business about not being controlled by the government. So, Waller makes that bomb in his head go boom, a somewhat poetic death for the Squad’s explosives expert:
Bye-bye, Shrapnel. You will not be missed.
The remaining Squad later converge, Mission Impossible-style, on Quadir’s mansion only to discover they’ve been lied to – the nerve agent is not so minimal that any one squad could covertly obtain it. Quadir has an entire basement full of the stuff, and the whole point was to get Deadshot near it so Waller could order in a drone strike to target the tracking device in Deadshot’s neck thus killing him and neutralizing the nerve agent. Waller would have gotten away with it, too, if weren’t for that dang Diggle and his “remember your daughter back home” logic to get Deadshot to vacate his post. Later, Waller is ever-so pissed because she had to send in an actual official team to clean up the mess. Diggle’s days as a Suicide Squad freelancer are probably over. However, so is his feud with Deadshot, the two somewhat understanding each other now. In the end, Diggle re-embraces Lyla, and acknowledges his need to recognize the gray in a world not usually composed of just black and white.
Oliver Loves Sara So Much He’ll Push Her Out of His Life -
Sara: “Oh, you sonofabitch. You did not just give me the ‘I love you so much I’m going to push you away to save you because I’m so dangerous’ speech!”
After Slade Wilson’s house visit in “The Promise,” Oliver has gone into kind of a knee-jerk, bad-ass loner mode. You know – pushing your girlfriend away, struggling to sleep through shame-induced nightmares, bullying the local Russian mafia into doing your bidding. The usual. However, Oliver’s solo sleuthing simply lands him at a location where Slade has left behind a gift: the leader of the Russian mob, with an arrow through his eye.
Goodbye, Russian mob boss whose name I never learned. To me, you’ll always be the, “Hey, wasn’t he an Observer on Fringe?” guy
Humbled, Oliver opens up to Sara, explaining that if he can’t defeat Slade then he can’t defend her from Slade. They kiss and hug, with her essentially reminding him, “You do remember I was trained by the League of Assassins, right? I’m not Gwen Stacey, Mary Jane, or Lois Lane getting taken by the big, bad supervillain. I’m the motherflippin’ Canary!” She also re-inforces his need to let others help him in this fight. That’s just what he needed to hear. He goes to Amanda Waller for help, who, as it turns out, has been tracking a curious fella who goes by “Deathstroke.”
THE REVIEW
A single moment from almost the very end of “Suicide Squad” best encapsulates the problem I had with this episode: Oliver is sitting at the Verdant bar, dutifully watching a TV upon which the latest expository Bethany Snow newscast delivers the following, “In international news, a United Nations inspections team was called in to investigate a chemical weapons facility hidden beneath the estate of humanitarian Gholem Qadir.” Oliver’s reaction? Almost non-existent. Maybe, at best, a slight nonverbal, “Huh, well what do you know about that.” Bethany is obviously describing the aftermath of Diggle and the Suicide Squad’s actions, and Oliver appears to have no clue. I know that the Suicide Squad is top-secret, and Amanda Waller, she who can match wits with Batman in the comics, could keep that from Oliver. However, shouldn’t Oliver have at least wondered where Diggle was the whole time? Shouldn’t this have been confirmation for him that his friend was okay?
Suicide Squad – Coming to The CW This Fall – I’m kidding. It’s not, but this did have the feel of a kind of backdoor pilot
Multiple times throughout “Suicide Squad” I felt as if I was watching a somewhat poorly conceived backdoor pilot for a show all about Deadshot and that gang toiling under Amanda Waller’s increasingly heavy thumb. By only incorporating Diggle into that storyline and leaving the rest of the regulars back doing their own thing in Starling City “Suicide Squad” ended up feeling like two different two shows co-existing together. Oliver pushing Sara away was pretty much vintage Arrow relationship drama [see: Tommy and Laurel last season, Roy and Thea right now]. With the Suicide Squad involving a small ops team being dispatched by a shadowy government organization headed by a genuine bad-ass, cold-hearted leader who happens to be African-American it was hard not to get a bit of an Agents of SHIELD vibe. Even by SHIELD‘s very low standards, characters like Shrapnel and Bronze Tiger are clearly not that interesting, though Tiger had a decent line or two this week.
However, the only thing connecting the two parts of this episode – Suicide Squad and Oliver & Sara – should not have been a stray, expository newscast one of the characters just happens to watch at just the right time. Of course, that isn’t actually the only thing connecting the two halves. From a character perspective, you could see where the writers intended for Diggle and Oliver’s personal journeys involving their significant others to parallel each other. The way they each overcame their stubbornness was, of course, very different, but the overall picture was of two taciturn, emotionally reserved men who each came close to sabotaging a deeply important romantic relationship.
Diggle and Lyla’s honeymoon is over
While it was glorious seeing Diggle receive such a showcase, it was challenging to fully engage with his drama since this was our first time getting to really know Lyla. Here, their conflict was rife with obvious years of shared history and barely healed over wounds, but to us Lyla is just a girl he flirted with last season, said, “Oh, btw, she’s my ex-wife,” before running to save her in Russia this season. Now, we’ve seen how the two met as well as how they are together when not having lots and lots of sex. As for Oliver, his pushing Sara away in order to keep her safe is an obvious comic book relationship cliche. In the form of that one time Thea broke up with Roy only to get back together all in the span of one episode it was fairly obvious Oliver and Sara’s rift wouldn’t last past this episode. However, both Stephen Amell and Caity Lotz played the emotional beats well. It was an interesting twist that in their final scene it was the girl who was steadfast and assured, lovingly consoling the emotional and weepy male. More or less, this was a story of a girlfriend waiting for her boyfriend to open up to her, emotionally, so that she could be there for him.
That girlfriend got an assist from her sister, though. Laurel pretty well summed it up when Oliver questioned why she might not be the best person to go to advice on the matter, “And why’s that? Is it because of the whole cheating, shipwreck, drowning, not drowning, you’re back, she’s back thing? Sorry, that’s the brutal AA honesty talking.” Essentially, Laurel advised Oliver in this episode much as he did last season when playing relationship coach for her and Tommy. That’s actually a fairly common pathway for TV couples who eventually end up together to take – alternating turns as the matchmaker from the sidelines. However, for as healthier a place as Laurel seems to be now there is still at least a slight sense that she has forever been robbed of what was her rather rightful claim to anger over Sara/Oliver, both their pairing in general and how fast it happened after her return to Starling City.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Diggle finally got another showcase episode, but the problem is that as he has receded into the background so have those characters connected to him, like Deadshot and Lyla. So, we were made to care about his drama with a girlfriend we didn’t really know. Plus, the apparent resolution of his conflict with Deadshot would have felt a bit more profound had the “doing it for my daughter” reveal not come one episode after Ivo’s “doing it for my dying wife” reveal and two episodes after the Clock King’s “doing it for my dying sister” reveal. Those are standard comic book back stories, but we didn’t need to have 3 of them in a row. The rest of the Suicide Squad was filled with paper-thin characters who were not in any way improved – did anyone other than hardcore Firefly fans care when Sean Maher’s Shrapnel died? On the other end, Oliver was given a very cliched “pushing my girl away to save her” plot, though its resolution did uphold Slade’s status as a bad-ass big bad. As a concept, this was a fun introduction to the Suicide Squad, but it wasn’t as compelling nor as well integrated with the rest of the show as it should have been.
THE NOTES
1. Comic Book 101: Floyd “Deadshot” Lawton
- First Appearance: 1950
Initially a Batman villain, Floyd Lawton grew up in a family with an abusive father. When finally pushed too far, he took aim at his father with a gun but missed, instead killing his beloved brother. So, he improved himself later in life to be a skilled marskman who absolutely never misses his target, using a cybernetic eye implant to further ensure his deadshot aim. The “doing it all for his daughter” story element was first introduced in the comics in 2005 when Deadshot discovered he had a daughter living in Star City. This has survived into the New 52, which also sees Deadshot as Suicide Squad team leader as well as engaged in a twisted romance with the never-not-awesome Harley Quinn.
2. Comic Book 101: The Suicide Squad
Suicide Squad from the New 52
- First Appearance: 1987 (as we know them)
Modeled after The Dirty Dozen and Mission Impossible, the Suicide Squad is just what the current episode depicted: a team of incarcerated villains who perform dangerous missions with low chances of survival for the U.S. Government in exchange for reduced prison sentences. As a result of this set-up, the team’s roster is in constant flux, though Deadshot, Bronze Tiger, and Captain Boomerang are usually involved. The current lineup in the New 52 includes Deadshot and Boomerang along with Cheetah, King Shark, Count Vertigo, and Harley Quinn. Amanda Waller is historically their government handler, and is pretty much just as cold-hearted a bad-ass as the version we’ve seen on Arrow. WB is rumored to be developing a mid-budget action film adaptation, with Dan Lin producing, and Justin Marks writing the script
3. Comic Book Easter Egg: Harley Quinn!
During Diggle and Lyla’s first fight near the Suicide Squad chambers (they couldn’t go out into a hallway?) a bubbly voice piped in from behind one of the cells offering to provide counseling. That was Harley Quinn, the Joker’s psychiatrist-turned-girlfriend, originally voiced by Arleen Sorkin in Batman: The Animated Series but voiced here by Tara Strong, who has also voiced Quinn in the recent video games Batman: Arkham City and Injustice: Gods Among Us. Harley Quinn is a delightfully crazy Squad member in the New 52.
4. Comic Book Easter Egg: Amanda Waller’s code name during the mission was “Mockingbird.” Why is that significant? In the comics, Mockingbird is the code name taken by the leader of a different though similar team-up group called the Secret Six. Most recently, Mockingbird was Lex Luthor, and once he gave up on it Amanda Waller took over.
5. I’m not crazy, right -
They’re totally saying that Oliver and Amanda Waller know each other, dating back to even before “Keep Your Enemies Closer” in which she only actually had scenes with Diggle. Right?
6. Okay, Felicity’s scene with Diggle was adorable, and I get that she wants some sense of normalcy in her life. However, was she crazy to send Diggle away? Yes, Slade can get to her no matter what, but that guy was her only protection.
What did you think? Like “Suicide Squad”? Hate it? Love it? Let us know in the comments section.
All of the pictures used in the above review, unless otherwise noted, came from CWTV.com © 2014 The CW Network, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
SECOND OPINION
- Arrow Review: The Suicide Squad (screencrush.com)
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