‘Arrow’ season 4, episode 17 review: ‘Beacon of Hope,’ Brie Larvin, and an Andy Diggle surprise

For those of you out there who love your episodes of “Arrow” when they are fast-paced and thrilling, and a little less focused on other matters, you were bound to like “Beacon of Hope.” Pound for pound, it may be our favorite episode of the season so far.

One of the biggest things that it did right is have much of the relationship content be a little more organic rather than forced. We’ve long been an Oliver / Felicity champion, but have long preferred their actions speaking louder than their words. They showed that they still cared about each other through this episode, which was almost entirely set at Palmer Tech and revolved around an invasion orchestrated by Brie Larvin, a young woman desperate to get Felicity’s technology in order to save her life. The moments that the two had were meaningful, and it was also nice to see them also share moments with other people. This was a good hour for Felicity and Thea, while Oliver got to see the world briefly through the eyes of our hero for the week in Curtis Holt.

Curtis is a hoot, mostly because he brings some of that wide-eyed enthusiasm and sense of fun that Felicity had in season 1. It was nice to see Felicity even get some of that back in how she handled the escape from the bees.

In the end, the important thing here is that Brie is detained once more for now, and after Curtis’ venture with Team Arrow, he went home to his other half saying that he had enough excitement for the time being … or did he? The cliffhanger tonight was incredibly interesting, given that it suggested that Andy Diggle may have been operating as a double agent this whole time and may not care nearly as much about John as we once thought.

One other thing we really loved about this episode: Even the flashbacks made sense and were exciting to watch with Baron Reiter as an energy-obsessed madman bent on gaining power. Episode Grade: A-.

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