Arrow Season 3 Episode 4
What They Say:
The Magician – Oliver learns that Malcolm is alive… and thinks he was responsible for Sara’s death. Laurel avoids Nyssa, believing that Sara’s association with the League of Assassins led to her demise.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Arrow had a lot of good, small moments throughout the previous episode as we got to see what Thea is up to and what she’s become, something that’s not quite obvious to Oliver and Roy at this point. There was a lot to like in seeing how Malcolm worked her over while toying with other things and getting time spent seeing Oliver get involved, second hand, in dealing with Mark Shaw definitely added to the fun. Diggle back in action reminds him and us that it’s hard to walk away from this life for a lot of reasons, so it wasn’t a surprise that he’d help out a bit with something for ARGUS. The show continues to juggle a lot of things while still not fully revealing what this season is about yet, but it does it so well that it’s easy to get wrapped up in it all.
While the core group has dealt, somewhat, with Sara’s death, there are things that keep happening that naturally bring it up again. The arrival of Nyssa from the League of Assassins dregs it all up again, but the way she reacts tips Oliver off that she knows something about how it happened. Since the trail has gone cold over who killed Sara, Oliver’s certainly going to grasp onto anything in order to get closer to some truth with it. While that starts things off, we also get Oliver spending some time with Thea. While he hasn’t quite seen her physical changes just yet, he knows something is very different about her with how she carries herself and he’s trying to figure out what it is. Unfortunately, he’s doing it in a way that frustrates her as all she wants is a brother. And that’s a hard thing for him to just be considering everything else that has gone on in the last few years.
Nyssa’s arrival in Starling City is something that certainly sets a few things in motion. When she visits her grave, Laurel’s already there and there’s definitely tension between them. With Laurel not exactly pleased by Nyssa’s existence, believing she’s dead because she fell in with the League, Nyssa makes it clear that Laurel didn’t really know her sister like she thinks she did and that there was a darkness in Sara already. Nyssa’s emotion during it is spot on and really adds a kind of controlled sadness that wants to rage. Nyssa also gets confronted outright by Oliver later on in trying to get her to work with him to find something out about who was involved since all his leads have gone cold and she obviously knows something. That she reveals that Malcolm is still alive to him goes over like a lead balloon. Already feeling drained and empty in a lot of ways, adding this to it just makes it all the worse.
With the lead that they’ve managed to latch onto, we get a great looking start to a scene with Oliver, Nyssa, Roy and Diggle heading to where a Buddhist monk named Jansen lives. The costuming works great here as does the location as it plays to the Asian aspect really well. Seeing the mostly well oiled machine moving through the place in search of him has a great feel about it as they’re mostly stealthy. Nyssa in particular as she’s feeling quite intense about everything. Of course, things don’t go quite as planned as when Nyssa confronts Jansen, it turns out that it’s actually Malcolm, who has seemingly been waiting for something just like this. Malcolm pulls off his escape in all the expected smoothness you’d expect and the fun of seeing how Oliver reacts to it all considering how their last fight went when he thought he killed him.
Interestingly, while there is some fun back and forth before Malcolm gets away, we eventually get it so that Malcolm sets up a meeting with Oliver to try and clear a few things up as he knows Oliver won’t kill him and he wants to get it all out there as to why he’s back. Malcolm does feel mostly believable here in that he’s only back in Starling City to watch over Thea as she tries to reestablish her life there now that she’s come back. There’s some almost comical manliness going on here about protecting Thea, but in the end it all comes down to the quite emphatic and largely believable declaration that he’s not the one that killed Sara. And for Oliver, that just means another dead end for him to deal with. One that won’t go smoothly because both Laurel and Nyssa aren’t going to believe anything that Malcolm says.
And we see that play out as Nyssa, upon discovering all of this, has Nyssa doing what makes the most sense in trying to draw out Malcolm. And that’s kidnapping Thea so that Malcolm will go right for her. We do get a pretty fun bit where Roy tries to protect her, but he’s more style over substance when it comes to dealing with someone from the League of Assassins. Nyssa keeps things simple with what he sets u here, but it gets complicated by Oliver not letting her use Thea as bait. Something that she obviously doesn’t like him doing, which gives us a decent fight scene, at least until Malcolm arrives. You do have to give points to Malcolm in that he doesn’t kill either of them outright and does admit that he just wants to talk to get things cleared up. But where’s the fun in that when you have three masked characters together in one place if you don’t have them fight.
There’s an interesting sense of incompleteness about things as the episode plays out before the end act because of Oliver believing Malcolm and pushing back enough against Nyssa to keep him under his protection for the moment. What we get in the final act are some interesting epilogue moments, from some flashback material that clues us in on just how involved Waller is in things that go back quite a ways to seeing Nyssa and Laurel finding a little common ground for the moment over what happened. But we also get some heartbreaking material as Quentin is still waiting to hear back from Sara, which is just cruel to watch. We also get a small but enticing little tease with Nyssa heading back to Nanda Parbat where we get a look at Matt Nable as Ra’s Al Ghul for the first time. It’s brief but it’s certainly enticing.
In Summary:
Arrow has a busy episode, but it’s one that’s about setting up things to come. The big takeaway is that Oliver gets to knew that Malcolm is alive and by the end of the episode he’s now protecting him. And that puts him at odd with the League once again, which will be pretty much a bad thing as time goes on. Nyssa is definitely a favorite character that I wish we had more of, but what we get tends to be pretty solid and this episode is no exception as she seeks vengeance for Sara’s death. Watching her and Laurel together definitely makes for some fun scenes and it also gives Laurel an extra bit of incentive to hit things up at the gym more. While I’m left wanting more of what’s going on Ra’s Al Ghul and what he’ll put into motion to go after Malcolm, the show as a whole was certainly enjoyable as we go through more of the grieving process overall and how everyone is still dealing with it in different ways. Now I’m just waiting to see Thea snap and do something big that will shock both Roy and Oliver.
Grade: B+
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