Arrow S02E08 – Review

By: Greg Berlanti, Andrew Kreisberg, Geoff Johns (story)

The Story: No time for nerd love when there be superhumans romping about.

The Review: Not that Arrow has ever been ashamed of its superhero roots, but for a long time, the show shied away from anything that would classify as “super.”  Obviously, this was part of an attempt to present Arrow as a semi-realistic and grounded superhero adaptation in the mold of the recent Batman movies, but there’s also always the risk that bringing in characters flashier and more powerful than our hero himself would marginalize him in his own show.

That doesn’t quite happen in this episode, but you can see the potential threat the moment we’re introduced to a bona fide superhuman as well as the mere promise of one.  The former, gifted with most basic gifts of prodigious strength and durability, gives Ollie so good a thrashing that his allies are forced to resort to the most drastic measures to save his life.  The latter, even with no special powers to speak of at present, receives such prominence—which is due just from his iconography—that he at times overshadows even Ollie’s presence in the episode.