‘Arrow’ season 5, episode 11 review: Meet Dinah Drake and Talia al Ghul
Remember when Laurel Lance wanted Oliver Queen to find a new Black Canary? After dealing with Black Siren on last week’s new episode of “Arrow,” tonight Oliver decided to take his search for a new hero up a notch. This included him getting some of his new recruits to offer up some suggestions here and there!
In the end, we saw the characters all start to circle around one name in particular: Tina Boland. She was a former Central City police officer who found herself transformed after the particle accelerator. Following this, she became a vigilante fighting evil-doers all over the place. Also, she was a meta-human with a power to rival Black Siren; she was just using it for good a little more often.
So Oliver and company (it never gets old saying that) eventually found Boland and made a pitch to her. It’s too bad that she wasn’t too keep to sign up. She instead had her own mission that she wanted to take on, and that included taking on a powerful drug dealer with connections to Tobias Church — and also the one who killed her partner / lover Vince. Also, this guy just so happened also be a meta with some trippy powers that can get in your head.
Through the eventual battle scenes we saw in this episode, we saw that Tina was clearly a badass. However, she also killed said drug dealer, and showed further that she didn’t play well with others … at first. Eventually, she returned to Mayor Queen’s office. It was there she revealed that Tina was just a cover name and her real one was … DINAH DRAKE. Boom. She also looks to be sticking around a while.
Felicity’s side mission – With the help of Rory, she channeled some of her recent rage over what happened with Billy and Diggle in order to try to hack the government. Basically, she’s getting closer and closer to becoming Elliot from Mr. Robot, which is fairly ironic given the fact that she probably was pretty close to Elliot from Mr. Robot back when she was in college.
Ironically, in the midst of her hack someone with knowledge of her college screen name surfaced, and made her an interesting proposition to meet in real life (or IRL, as the cool kids now say). Who she met was basically Mini Felicity, a young woman with a hacker group who was apparently inspired by her efforts. She had information that she was willing to pass along, and it was all that she needed in order to exonerate John. Well, the problem here is that she was clearly hiding something about joining said organization in order to get it. This should put her on a dark path, mostly because she should know better than anyone at this point that secrets don’t work out well.
In the end, the good news is that Diggle is a free man!
Enter Talia al Ghul – We’ve been so excited to see her first appearance on the show, and above all else, we were excited to have her spice up Oliver’s flashback story. She gave Oliver an offer in order to help thwart Kovar, but in the process, she wanted something from him — the completion of a mission. The two took it on together, and she eventually passed along a message to him: Why is he not going home? He spent so much time chasing other threats, and his father literally wrote a book of instructions for him in terms of what he should be doing.
Also, it just so turns out that Talia is the person responsible for turning Oliver into the Arrow — she’s the one who got him the costume, and she is also the one who prepared him for a real life as a vigilante. Think of this as the pilot before the pilot.
Overall – An entertaining episode, albeit one that certainly felt different than many others on the show given that there were so many new characters who we’re still getting to know. The Dinah Drake surprise is certainly a nice twist he didn’t see coming. Grade: B.
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