Arrow Season 4, Episode 4 “Beyond Redemption”
Written by Beth Schwartz & Ben Sokolowski
Directed by Lexi Alexander
Airs Wednesdays at 8pm ET on The CW
While “Beyond Redemption” doesn’t escape the logistical issues season four of Arrow‘s been plagued with, it’s a major step forward for the show, both moving away from some of the troublesome characterizations from the season opener, and streamlining some of the many stories it’s trying to juggle at the moment. Anchored by the strongest Captain Lance arc in years, “Beyond Redemption” is the first light of hope Arrow‘s offered its audience this season.
There’s a no-bullshit approach to (most) of this episode that feels necessary: beginning with the people of Team Arrow and the police department realizing the city is fundamentally broken, to the point even the best people are willing to do desperate things. How this story comes to light, is typical Arrow nonsense: a rogue police officer with an inconsistent ideology isn’t the cleanest avenue into the deeper story about Lance’s increased desperation in Oliver’s absence – and when Team Arrow discovers he’s been working with Damien Darhk, it brings home just how broken Star City’s become, when the city’s most honorable, self-righteously moralistic man falls into the grips of the Darhk Side (I’m sorry – it’s just too easy).
Even better is how one-sided the debate between Oliver and Lance is when called out for his secret alliance: Lance tries to hide behind the writer’s bullshit justification of doing this for his daughter or blah blah blah, and Oliver immediately shuts it down. Regardless of how bad things got when Oliver abandoned the city (something I don’t think Quentin really hits Oliver with hard enough here), Lance should’ve known what he was doing when he turned to others for help, and then got stuck when Darhk started threatening Oliver’s life.
(Side note: Love how Oliver calls out Lance’s patriarchal bullshit about “protecting” a woman who is a masked vigilante. The point would hit home harder, however, if we’d stop having fight scenes where Laurel gets her ass kicked around, until the obligatory moment when the tides turn for Team Arrow.)
Their conversations in this episode are so important in bringing Arrow back down to Earth: it marries the motivations between Lance’s moment of weakness and Oliver’s moment of strength, when he decides to announce his mayoral campaign, and try to save a city that may be, beyond saving. His platform is the best touch of all: in theme with the show’s transformation from a story about one man into a group, his opening speech (written by Thea, who apparently is totally normal after her rabid throat-slashing last week) is about being united, and working together to save the city.
However simplistic the sentiment might be, it helps align the various members of Team Arrow (including Codename Detective Crankypants) with the tribulations of Star City in a way the show hasn’t been concerned with since the middle of season two (and honestly, the end of the first season, before Deathstroke came in and transformed the show). Star City’s always been such a passive presence in Arrow‘s world, a place where politicians get murdered and the city gets trashed on a regular basis: despite all that plight, the team’s attempts to “save the city” always came secondary to the personal character motivations and dilemmas pushing the city itself into the background. Oliver running for mayor, and Lance trying to clean up the town with no resources whatsoever, offers a much more self-contained version of Arrow than we’ve had in recent years, an embrace of the show’s home location I haven’t felt in a long time.
All of this helps cloud some of the episode’s lesser elements: I’m talking about the idiocy of the island flashbacks (Oliver teaches a woman to play dead in two seconds! Who cares about the bearded guy stashing those drugs!), and the rogue cop whose motivations for stealing drugs makes absolutely no sense (“We don’t kill cops.” “You just killed two of them!” “They were in the wrong place at the wrong time!” what the fuck?!!). As always, Lian Yu turns out to be as exciting as watching bread toast – and by the same token, an Arrow villain whose ideologies are utter nonsense that shifts from scene to scene is really nothing new. Thankfully, those stories are obfuscated by those Oliver/Lance scenes – without them, “Beyond Redemption” might be a more befitting title than the writers would probably hope.
Other thoughts/observations:
- Didn’t talk about Felicity’s story, but a little of her in this episode goes a long way. There are glitches in the system, and Mr. Terrific is on the case, whether Felicity likes it or not.
- Wait, did Thea just buy 80 fucking kilograms of cocaine like it was something casual? Isn’t that like $200,000 in coke?
- The Salmon Ladder is back!
- I wonder if Oliver’s rampant abuse of Palmer Industries funds will come back to bite Felicity in the ass at some point.
- “She’s speaking because she’s remembering!” Your weekly reminder that Laurel is the worst.
- Sara’s on the loose! Which… is probably not a good thing?
- Liza Warner’s appearance in this episode is really odd, considering her alter ego in the DC Comics is Lady Cop, a character whose story arc is pretty much summed up by an attempted sexual assault, and a weird instance where she talks to another girl about STD’s. 1970’s comic books, man.
- Oliver is setting up shop in Sebastian Blood’s old campaign office – odd, but fun (and thematically relevant) choice for Foundry 4.0.
- Next week, John Constantine finds his way into the Arrowverse in the rare “post-cancellation crossover”. Having not seen any Constantine, which episodes should I watch before next week’s episode? Leave your suggestions in the comment below (and thank you!).