Last night, Arrow reached its second-to-last ever episode. But with Oliver Queen already having died in “Crisis on Infinite Earths,” it focused on his daughter, Mia Queen (Katherine McNamara), and the start of her partnership with the Black Canaries Laurel Lance (Katie Cassidy) and Dinah Drake (Juliana Harkavy). In short, it was a backdoor pilot for potential spinoff Green Arrow and the Canaries. We’ve yet to get the announcement that the sequel show is going ahead, but the shocking cliffhanger ending certainly set things up to be explored in a full series.
The episode began by focusing on the utopian future of Star City 2040, which is now in a much better state thanks to the post-“Crisis” reality reboot. However, some old problems started to resurface across the hour. First, a young woman named Bianca Bertinelli went missing, leading to Mia, Laurel and Dinah to suit up again to investigate. The culprit turned out to be Bianca’s possessive ex-boyfriend, who’d made himself the latest Deathstroke. Intriguingly, he has a tattoo on his arm that Mia realized matches up with the Hozen, the stone arrow-head that once belonged to her father.
The final scene then saw Mia and William’s moment of reflection at Oliver’s statue rudely interrupted when they were hit with tranq darts and kidnapped by unknown assailants. The same folks then went after a sleeping J.J., Diggle’s son and Mia’s fiancé. However, he was also hit with a blast of S.T.A.R. Labs memory tech which made him remember his pre-“Crisis” life, including his criminal career as Deathstroke. No doubt this is going to cause problems for his and Mia’s relationship.
Mia’s kidnapping will surely be touched on in next week’s Arrow series finale, which will find the heroine somehow traveling back to 2020. Still, it’s clear that there’s a bigger mystery at work here that would unfold over the first season of the prospective spinoff series, something that goes back to Oliver’s origins on Lian Yu. Fingers crossed then that The CW greenlight Green Arrow and the Canaries so we can see it all play out.
