Arrow season 5, episode 15 review: Prometheus revealed with a stroke of trickery
Congratulations to the writers at Arrow — they found a way to have Prometheus revealed that somehow surprised us.
Right in the middle of Wednesday night’s “Fighting Fire with Fire,” the show made one of its gutsier moves in outright revealing that it was Adrian Chase, the District Attorney who works with Oliver Queen at the Mayor’s Office, who is out to systematically destroy him + ruin his life. There is still no word as to why, but this is the biggest reveal by far of the season. It means that Oliver has someone close to him who can manipulate him and make things so much more difficult. This also means that if you go back and watch the season, there are probably some clues sprinkled throughout.
Even through the first half of tonight’s episode, the show used the comic-book perception of Chase as a way to trick you. In the comics, this character is Vigilante. Here, Vigilante is clearly someone else given that it was after fighting the guy Prometheus first took off the mask. Judging from the end of the episode, Susan Williams is now in grave danger after Adrian decided that he wanted to speak with her about a story.
Can we stop in for a minute and say that Arrow this season has its best one-two punch of villains that it’s had arguably in the entire series? Prometheus and Vigilante are both great characters, and it’s fun to see them not actually working together. This makes the most sense, given that bad guys all do tend to have their own egos and working together isn’t something that necessary stands at the top of the priority list.
A defense of Oliver Queen … as a character who’s always been flawed
We saw all over social media last night (really to an extremely cruel degree) people roasting the writers and even Stephen Amell for the direction of the Oliver character, but what we saw from him was something very consistent from his character. He’s not a perfect person who does the right thing all of the time, and he has a misguided view that his way is the right way even when it’s clearly not. We got a good example of that when it comes to everything with Thea and Susan. We was so intent on protecting his girlfriend (or ex at the time, but they seem to be back together now) to the point where Thea wanted to quit her job and go find herself. Then, he used Felicity to do everything that she could to try to make things right. Him using his own ex, who was grieving the loss of Billy Malone soon, to help out his current girlfriend was awkward and then some. Yet, Oliver’s always been selfish; even if you think back to the days of the Olicity relationship, one of the reasons why it never worked as well as we wanted it to was because Oliver didn’t put nearly as much into it as Felicity did in the early days. It didn’t feel like he earned her.
Where other characters stand
For Felicity, she actually went against Diggle’s advice in eventually joining the evil Helix hacker group. She seems to think that having them with her, despite questionable motives and practices, is better than going it alone in the hacking world. The group’s useful, but there are going to be huge drawbacks that she’ll probably discover eventually.
Meanwhile, Curtis learned that Paul wanted to divorce him, and there was a lengthy discussion about his new inventions a.k.a. “balls” that led to a series of jokes straight out of a Chuck Lorre sitcom. After having such a great Wild Dog episode in “Spectre of the Gun,” why reduce the character down to immature jokes now?
Our overall take
This episode of Arrow fit the bill in terms of being one of the most exciting ones that we’ve seen. Having Prometheus be revealed was a nice touch, and at the same time, the stunt crew is among TV’s best. While Oliver made some dodgy decisions, it made sense for his character to make them. The weak points came mostly in sidelining Diggle too much, diminishing Wild Dog, and the flashbacks, which we barely even mention anymore because they’re simply not interesting. Grade: B+.
Next time – Be sure to visit the link here to see a further preview for the next new episode of the show! (Photo: The CW.)