The season premier of Arrow saw Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) struggling to lead his life as Star City’s struggling mayor and as the newly-solo Green Arrow in the face of two new menaces to his rule: brutal mobster Tobias Church (Chad L. Coleman) and a sinister masked rival archer. In The Recruits he acts on advice from his former teammates and brings the city’s other independent vigilantes into his fold. These include longtime ally Curtis Holt (Echo Kellum), former Black Canary imposter Evelyn Sharp (Madison McLaughlin), and the streetwise Wild Dog (Rick Gonzalez.) The team chafes under Green Arrows brutal training methods – which flashbacks reveal he learned as a recruit for the Russian Bratva criminal society – but have no choice but to take the field when a sorcerer clad in rags targets a corporation aiding in Star City’s reconstruction.
What follows is a fairly standard super hero parable about the value of teamwork made gripping by clever editing, interviewing of subplots, and the flashy introduction the mystical Ragman (Joe Dinicol) whose origins date back to Damien Darkh’s successful nuclear strike in his failed attempt to end human civilization. This was a shocking event glossed over much too quickly at the end of season 4 and Ragman’s presence is a great way to explore the aftermath while keeping events moving forward. Meanwhile, Tobias Church shows up to create more chaos and Coleman continues killing it in the role, sowing mayhem with charismatic delight. If The Recruits has a flaw, it is that the conflicts between the growing team are resolved a little too quickly, but this convenient ending is quickly undone as the enemy archer once again overtakes the episode’s closing scene and discloses a frightenint code name: Prometheus.
As stated above, The Recruits weaves its subplots together well and we begin to see that those who happily retired from Team Arrow are actually not faring that much better than Oliver is himself. A standard mission for John Diggle (David Ramsey) and his military unit goes terribly awry, and it is utterly frustrating to see Green Arrow’s unstoppable right hand man rendered increasingly helpless as he realizes that the comfort he sought in uniform was a lie and that the military world that he thought made sense actually makes no sense at all.
Thea Queen (Willa Holland) might be having an easier time, but we see that her heroic side is once again not so easily put to rest. She reflexively reverts to the use of super heroine athletic skills to gain intel on an enemy and is taking the problems of Quintin Lance (Paul Blackthorne) onto herself. Whether it’s intentional or not, Thea seems to be setting herself up as a surrogate daughter for the troubled Quintin who still grieves the loss of his daughter Laurel. What this will mean for both of them could be very interesting.
There is no doubt that with The Recruits episode Arrow is following a formula, but it’s a nutritious, filling one, and the packaging it comes in is pretty darn cool.
