Cupid’s Arrow
Before the fun can start this week, we get a brief flashback to six months ago during Slade Wilson’s siege. Oliver notices a woman in trouble with one of the mirakuru soldiers and makes quick work of him. The woman he saved turns out to be our villain of the week, Cupid.
Cut to present day, where Captain Lance shows Arrow the corpse of last week’s baddie Isaac Stanzler, who was found wearing a green hood. Lance tells Arrow that Stanzler had been killed while in police transport with a specially modified arrow and that the likely motive behind the murder was to get Arrow’s attention.
Back at Arrow HQ, Oliver inspects the arrow given to him by Captain Lance. After breaking apart the spear he finds a note inside telling him the address of the killer’s apartment. When he and Diggle visit the apartment they find the walls covered with newspaper articles about the Arrow and more arrows including another one with a specially modified spear which Oliver finally notices is shaped like a heart. At that moment, a cell phone inside the room starts ringing. Oliver answers and Cupid is on the other end. She offers to join with him and also sends him a picture of her next victim who is shown with a bomb strapped to his chest.
Some quick hacking from Felicity identifies Cupid identity to be Carrie Cutter, a former member of the SCPD SWAT team until leaving the force about a year before Oliver returned from the island. Some additional digging from Felicity shows her at several Arrow-related crime scenes including the week before at Ted Grant’s gym. She also turns out to be a gardening enthusiast which Felicity uses to figure out the location of the hostage as a greenhouse near Cupid’s apartment.
Oliver and Roy (now nicknamed Arsenal) check out the greenhouse though Roy is quickly incapacitated by Cupid. Cupid declares her love to Oliver but he makes it clear he isn’t interested. While he manages to save the hostage, Cupid is easily able to escape.
After regrouping at HQ, Diggle informs Oliver that during Cupid’s days as a cop she had become obsessed with her partner and quit the force shortly after a presumably unfavorable psych evaluation. With this information, Oliver decides to question Cupid’s psychiatrist to gain some insight on her behavior.
When Oliver visits Cupid’s former therapist, she tells him that Cupid suffers from Attachment Disorder which has caused her to be unable to form any meaningful relationships and instead focus on one person which of course in Cupid’s case is Oliver. The therapist warns Oliver to not lie to Cupid and right before he makes his leave, she also advises that he could use some therapy too (brilliant observation Dr. Obvious!). Meanwhile Cupid pays a visit to a computer nerd who used to be one of her informants. He tells her that he used an algorithm to figure out that the Arrow operates in the general area of Thea’s nightclub. As soon as Cupid receives this new information, she kills the informant by stabbing him with one of her arrows.
After Oliver is informed about Cupid figuring out his association with the nightclub, he calls her cellphone and asks for the two of them to meet anywhere else. She tells him that she knows a place and warns him not to lie to her. When Oliver arrives at the meeting place he recognizes it as the same place he saved her at six months ago. Oliver tells her again that he’s not interested but she doesn’t believe him and starts fighting him. The fight takes them down to a subway track where Cupid decides to handcuff him (just in time for an oncoming subway) so they can die together. Oliver breaks free from his cuffs and saves them both just before they get hit by the subway which naturally only makes Cupid more infatuated with Oliver. Not believing that Cupid belongs in prison, Oliver and Diggle use their connections with A.R.G.U.S. to make her the newest member of the Suicide Squad (let’s please have another one of those episodes soon).
Felicity and Ray Palmer
Meanwhile at Queen Consolidated, Ray Palmer is having a busy day. After inviting Felicity to “strictly platonic” business dinner, he calls a news conference to announce changing the company name from Queen Consolidated to Palmer Technologies.
Diggle makes a visit to Felicity at the newly named Palmer Technologies. He warns Felicity that Oliver is clearly bothered by her budding relationship with Palmer and it’s starting to effect his performance in the field. Felicity counters that if it bothers Oliver so much then he should suck it up and tell her himself.
At Palmer and Felicity’s business dinner, he tries to convince their guests to sell some mineral rights to him but they’re reluctant to do so. Felicity interjects on Palmer’s behalf saying that he’s more than just a businessman and that he’s more interested in making a difference than money (though it doesn’t hurt that he apparently makes a crap load of it). This speech was apparently good enough to persuade Palmer’s business associates to close the deal with him. Afterwards, Felicity and Palmer share a kiss (just in time for Oliver to walk by and see no less) and Palmer quickly apologizes for not being able to keep the night professional.
Later that night, Palmer is seen in his office looking at schematics for a new and rather cool looking ATOM exosuit.
Thea
Thea is on the verge of reopening the nightclub with the last step being to hire a DJ. As she is holding auditions, one blonde guy in particular is so confident in his abilities, he tries telling the other applicants to go home. Thea, of course, wants to see what the guy is made of before she hires him but he refuses saying he doesn’t audition (he’s obviously never heard of the phrase “show don’t tell”). Shockingly, the DJ’s demand to be given a job sight unseen fails to sway Thea and she sends him packing.
Sadly for Thea, the club’s grand reopening gets off to a rather slow start as the DJ she did hire proves to be a wash and she fires him mid-gig. The over confidant guy from earlier offers to step in and without other options Thea reluctantly hires him. Though I personally wasn’t impressed (was there really no other DJ in Starling City that could play Turn Down For What?), he successfully turns the night around and gives Thea a kiss before making his leave.
Flashback Time
After Oliver gets scolded by Tatsu (Maseo’s wife) for not doing his own laundry (Oliver is forced to admit that he doesn’t know how), Maseo goes off to meet a contact of his down by the docks and says he’ll be back in an hour (he might as well be in a horror movie saying “I’ll be right back”).
Nine hours later, Maseo still hasn’t returned and both Oliver and Tatsu are more than a little worried. They both decide to go down to the docks to see if they can find him. Once there, they try to approach a group of gangsters and while Oliver pretty much gets his ass handed to him, Tatsu proves to be pretty effective with a sword and knocks off all but one gangster who admits that the Triad killed three members of A.R.G.U.S. a few hours ago leaving Oliver and Tatsu to conclude that Maseo was one of them.
Back at the apartment, Tatsu wonders how she’ll be able to tell her son what happened to Maseo but instead she and Oliver return to find Maseo waiting for them. He says that after the other three A.R.G.U.S. agents were killed, Waller put him on lock down and wasn’t able to call. Oliver recognizes this as a family moment and leaves to do his laundry.
Cliffhanger
An Asian man is walking down an alleyway until he’s confronted by a scary looking guy in a duster. The thug reveals himself to be Digger Harkness who quickly dispatches the other guy with a boomerang.
Analysis
Easily the weakest part of the episode is the subplot with Thea’s club. It’s implied that she’s meant to start a romance with the DJ (I don’t even think they gave him a name here) but I really don’t see it going anywhere and frankly I’m already tired of the dude. Part of me is hoping to see Malcolm Merlyn scare him off in the next episode or two.
‘Draw Back Your Bow’ was plenty entertaining but to be perfectly honest most of it felt rather inconsequential. Sure, there are hints of Ray Palmer becoming the Atom but there’s not really much reason they couldn’t have just inserted this into another episode. Heck, even the flashback don’t really do anything to advance the plot. I also thought it was a little odd that Captain Boomerang makes his first appearance on Arrow given that he’s primarily an adversary of the Flash but since the next episode will be a crossover with The Flash, I’m willing to let it slide.
The show will be taking the night off next week but when we come back, Barry Allen makes his return to Starling City.
