Arrow Season 3, Episode 1 “The Calm”
Story by Greg Berlanti & Andrew Kreisberg
Teleplay by Marc Guggenheim & Jake Coburn
Directed by Glen Winter
Airs Wednesdays at 8pm ET on The CW
When “The Calm” begins, things are going pretty well for Starling City’s favorite vigilante: The Arrow is winning awards from the city (given by none other than newly-appointed Captain Lance), bad guys are being ticked off one by one with ease; simply put, everything is good for Oliver Queen, even though his family’s company is about to be sold from underneath him. But as the title ominously suggests, peace in Starling City was not built to last: and as Arrow begins to set up shop for the various stories of the season, “The Calm” delivers an unsettling, surprisingly brutal episode about identity and family, an hour that appears to catalyze a number of ambitious stories for Arrow‘s third season.
Admittedly, “The Calm” isn’t the most subtle of episodes: Oliver’s journey of self-discovery through the episode is a familiar one, the only added wrinkle his short-lived romance with Felicity, which ends when a new master of Vertigo appears in Starling City and immediately begins playing Scarecrow-esque games with Oliver’s head. What begins as a kick-ass Team Arrow operation and display of peace in the city slowly begins to crumble with each passing minute: Starling City is losing population after a second terrorist attack, and Oliver’s losing the fight between having a personal life and being the hero his city still needs (ugh… “You have failed this city” still lives on), a conflict of identity seen with nearly every character throughout the hour.
Sometimes, exploring each character through this lens works wonders: whether Quentin struggling to become a less active police officer (how many heart attack-like events can one man have?) or Oliver’s identity crisis between being himself or being the Arrow (aka being able to love/not trying to give a shit about anyone), “The Calm” gives us a number of strong examples where people find themselves wondering who they are in this new age, like Barry Allen calling Oliver out of the blue (a moment that fits much better in the context of this episode than The Flash‘s pilot) or the new incarnation of the Count pointing out that evil will never stop: it will always take new forms, and it will always threaten the peace and protection of those Oliver loves – a short list, considering his entire immediate family is either dead or missing (no sign of Thea in this episode; I imagine she’ll be training for a bit, and Roy won’t be happy about her absence). Without that family, Oliver finds himself without an identity outside the mask – and considering the events of the end of the episode, looks to become a darker and darker place for Oliver to try and maintain his sanity.
It’s not exactly a new internal drama for Oliver: the struggle of finding balance between personal and professional is not new to Arrow – it’s only the addition of Felicity into the mix that makes the material feel fresh. Of course, it leans on the writer’s knowledge of how much the audience loves Oliver and Felicity together: we want to see the two go on dates and make it work, even in the face of imminent danger, damnit! Felicity’s just too adorable not to love, and “The Calm” goes to great lengths to show how unhappy and unsettled Oliver is, even when the city is peaceful: so it only adds emotional resonance when violence again pushes Oliver back into his little green shell, even though it’s kind of repeating similar bets it hit with Arrow/Ollie in previous seasons.
However, all this awesome character work only dominates the middle third of the episode: the rest of “The Calm” sprints through flashbacks (where Amanda Waller appears to be acting like a Bad Ass) and present day to set up a lot of stuff for the next 20+ episodes to dig into. Besides the Olicity material (which includes copious use of the word “love”, which makes all us Arrow fans swoon when used with Felicity and Ollie), there’s the debut of Ray Palmer (by an energetic, charismatic Brandon Routh… big improvement over CBS’s failed, awful sitcom Partners from last year), Arsenal (saving Speedy for Thea in future seasons, maybe?), and of course, Diggle’s baby, which leads to this clumsy story about Diggle stepping away from the battlefield to be a better father, driving a short-lived wedge between Arrow and his right-hand man for the sake of having drama in the episode (though it does speak to the duality of each character’s identity in this episode, just in a goofy manner).
And then there’s the end of the episode, which delivers the most shocking, brutal moment of the series to date: the dead body of Sara Lance flying through the air and smashing into a dumpster, right in front of Starling City’s favorite district attorney (and sister), Laurel. Now, as meaningful as that moment is in framing this entire season (as in, we cannot run from the identities we’ve built ourselves, especially if that includes being an international assassin), it comes at the cost of the return of her character, which comes out of nowhere in the episode’s climatic scene, ultimately feeling like an exploitative, cord-cutting move when she suddenly dies minutes later (after telling her sister she had secret business being in town, of course), shot by an unknown assailant using a voice modulator (again, of course: why did Oliver have to introduce those things to Starling City?) and setting the stage for an emotional Oliver, and a Laurel driven by her sister’s death to take up the mantle of Black Canary, which I’m assuming the show will finally catalyze this season (last season’s finale and Katie Cassidy’s Instagram account heavily allude to this, so I don’t think I’m jumping the gun on this one). Sure, the death is meaningful, but in the face of everything else going on in “The Calm”, feels tacked on in order to drum up interest in future stories – with no context or clues into how or why Sara died (or that she was even in dire trouble in this hour), it’s hard to feel anything but superficial shock in the wake of her sudden death, more surprised at the decision by the writers than the actual conclusion of Caity Lotz’s run on the show (which, let’s face it, was going to happen eventually, given the history of the comic book).
That doesn’t make “The Calm” a bad episode: just one that feels a little too full, with the writers of Arrow trying to be exciting and coy at the same time, but unable to hold back from teasing the audience to an extreme degree. Thankfully, all these new possible directions for the show are exciting, able to piggyback on the massive amounts of dramatic momentum built throughout last season and push the show into intriguing new story lines to explore throughout the season. Sure, it might not be the most nuanced material: but given the episode’s enthusiasm for the material (not to mention director Glen Winter’s fantastic direction during action sequences, and the show’s always-brilliant use of color in set design), is a satisfying opening hour for one of TV’s best dramas.
— Randy