The best scene
of the episode happens in the medical cell at the Starling City Penitentiary,
where Quentin’s healing from an assault by one of the many criminals he and the
Arrow put behind bars. Quentin’s in jail because he helped the Arrow and
wouldn’t give the police information about him. Laurel visits her father,
bothered and upset by Slade’s truth bomb in the last episode about Oliver’s
after-work activity. Quentin’s freedom depends on him offering any useful
information about the man under the hood. Laurel approaches her father with the
information that’ll free him from the cell, free him from danger, and restore
his name. Laurel reminds him that a year ago he thought of him as a killer that
the city needed off the streets. Quentin acknowledges he wanted to know the
Arrow’s identity and would have given over his livelihood for the information.
The passage of time sometimes makes one wiser, more clear-headed about what
before was a blur. Quentin doesn’t want to take the Arrow off the street, for a
myriad of reasons including the thought of his sacrifice and what the man under
the hood takes to bed with him every night. The symbology of the Arrow means
more than whoever fights under the hood.
Laurel listens
to her father with tears coming to her eyes because she had spent the better
part of the episode piecing together Oliver’s time-line with the Arrow’s. Slade
told her the truth for the sake of distraction. Hurting Oliver through the
people he loved was phase one of the plan. Before her father told her why the
Arrow mattered she thought about betrayal and couldn’t look at her sister for
her additional duplicitousness. She saw the scars on her sister’s break and
then remembered the scars on Oliver’s chest. The doctor told her about Sara’s
deep scar tissue when she went to visit her sister after that unexpected fight
with Slade. Pieces once scattered in a cardboard box waiting to fit into a
patterned picture began to move about her mind in an epiphanic dance, and those
scars symbolized survival to her. Oliver and Sara were scarred fighting to
survive on the island and beyond until their respective returns to Starling
City. So, Laurel decides not to use what she knows to hurt Oliver any more than
he’s been hurt.
Slade’s layered
plan to destroy Oliver continues to terrific success. By episode’s end Oliver
sits alone, defeated, near tears, until Laurel hugs him. In between the start
of the episode, when he and his team blow up the applied science division
building of Queen Consolidated, and the end of the episode, when Oliver’s
accomplished little but taking a vial of mirakura with which to develop a cure,
he endures fits and starts. Important conversations are interrupted by
convenient-yet-inconvenient phone calls. His attempt to repair the news that
broke Thea fails because he needs to stop Slade from injecting dangerous
convicts with the mirakura. Slade surprises him twice. Oliver never gains
confidence against his opponent. Blowing up the applied sciences building means
he needs to beat Slade to the next top science company’s campus, which he
doesn’t. The flashback showed Ivo revealing a way to stop Slade that involved
another dangerous mission on board the freighter that didn’t work five years
ago but may work in the present. Oliver loses another fight to Slade. He’s in
that bleak stage before the inevitable triumph.
Quentin’s
perception of Oliver is one Oliver cannot see because one rarely realizes
what’s looking back at him or her through the looking glass. Oliver
acknowledges that everything happening is his fault. Slade/Deathstroke is as
much a symbol as Oliver—that’s the point of a nemesis. A nemesis is the other
side of a coin, dirtier and uglier, the side one groans when losing a coin
toss. Slade’s not a unique character in comics or genre television. The symbol
of power corrupting good that the hero sees and vows to defeat so that he or
she can save whatever good is left after corrosion. Slade’s power dwarfs
Oliver’s. Oliver will find in the love and support of others the strength to
defeat Slade. Okay, that’s an overly sentimental idea, but the soapy Arrow
writers probably tossed that idea around. When Felicity, Caitlin, and Cisco,
develop the cure to stop Slsde Wilson, the personal relationship between Slade
and Oliver will matter more when he’s—Slade---ultimately stopped.
Slade’s goal in
“The Man Under The Hood” is to halt attempts to stop him, and so the episode
halting. Thea halts efforts by her brother and mother to reconcile, to avoid
losing all the money Robert earned. Quentin halts his own freedom (before
Laurel sets him free using politics). Arrow’s rarely overtly soapy, but “The
Man Under The Hood’ lathered the audience in soap. Among the lower lights of
the episode was Thea’s horror when telling her brother that she almost kissed
her half-brother and that her biological mother and father are mass murderers
(and responsible for Robert’s death—which Thea and Oliver may not know yet).
Oliver had to choose between stopping Slade’s super convicts and Ray’s life.
The aforementioned conversation between Quentin and Laurel elevated the story
above the soap-opera tropes, as well as the lovely memory Oliver shares with
Isabel that explained why Robert, whose mistress was Isabel, didn’t run away
with her (another soap opera element that is unnecessary).
Other Thoughts:
-The Arrow fight
scenes continue to amaze. Bravo.
-Isabel was shot
dead by Diggle, but Slade resurrected her. Summer Glau can kick more ass than
she has.
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