Arrow Review: “Unfinished Business” (Season 1, Episode 19)

Oliver having to lead Quentin into the club’s basement would be among the show’s most tense moments, were there any real possibility that Lance would actually bumble into Oliver’s fortress of solitude. I mean, this week is nuts, but not that nuts. Instead, detective Lance finds only liquor boxes and painter’s sheets, Tommy having ruse-d the place up without Oliver’s knowledge. It makes bafflingly little physical sense that Tommy would be able to hide the supercomputers, salmon ladders, and omnipresent Microsoft tablets all by his lonesome, but it’s a turn you just have to go with.

Besides, it provides another strong Tommy-Oliver scene that reopens the rift between the two. Oliver’s five-year island walkabout may have made him a more conscious person, but it’s also given him a bad case of the high ‘n mightys. Just because Tommy’s been living in the lap of luxury doesn’t mean he can’t change for the better, and Oliver connecting him to Vertigo only a hair slower than Lance is the last straw for Starling City’s premiere unloved son, who runs right back into the arms of daddy, Malcolm.

You can add that to the well-documented “Oliver is a massive hypocrite” counter, seeing as he’s the one getting mixed up in the drug game this week. Felicity’s live-and-let-live philosophy faces a big obstacle in The Count, as his escape from an insane asylum leads to the death of numerous partygoers, and abusers across Starling City. Causality is telling Oliver those lives are on his head, as he could have just put The Count down for, well, the count, weeks ago, and buried the Vertigo recipe along with him. Felicity catches a break, though, as the special sauce making this latest batch of Vertigo so toxic happens to be an antipsychotic. And where can you find antipsychotics by the barrel full…

The insane asylum of course! It’s a reveal that acts as an Evel Knievel-worthy ramp for launching the episode off the rails, and into Crazy-Town. The mayor of Crazy-Town happens to be the suddenly sinister head shrink, who, by the by, got the Vertigo formula by analyzing extract harvested from The Count’s kidneys. When the doc tries to cover his tracks by forcing Oliver to shotgun a beaker of Vertigo, only to have Oliver saved at the last second by Digg’s intervention, you can do one of two things: balk, or clap.

I chose the latter, and would recommend you do the same. Arrow’s successes have rarely been flawless, but sometimes they’re delicious enough to make the flaws more palatable. A prime example is how the doc reveal cleverly delays Oliver’s judgment on The Count, while simultaneously setting up a situation where Oliver has to kill another person in cold blood, without so much as casting a shadow on the hypocrisy of it all. Episodes like “Unfinished Business” really aren’t good for Arrow’s health in the long run, because no amount of crazy is sustainable forever. Steak is always more satisfying and nutritious in the long run… but I’ll be damned if taking a hit, and going along for the ride, isn’t just more fun sometimes.

• Stray Thoughts

-Island Update: Shado’s Mr. Miyagi-inspired combat training for Oliver involves slapping a bowl of water, which makes him better at pulling a bowstring. Don’t think about that sentence for too long, or your nose might start bleeding.

-All the same, Stephen Amell is so good as the whiney Island Oliver, that he almost seems miscast by comparison in all his other scenes. It takes skill to have a guy that handsome actually cut the sexual tension between two other characters.

-Hilariously Specific Trick Arrow of the Week: The explosive arrow makes a triumphant return, not once, but twice. As insanely fortunate as Oliver was for not getting blown-up by the one in the asylum, the fireball from the first explosive arrow was glorious.

-Say it with me one more time kids: This – Episode – Was – Cray-Cray!