Arrow 1.04: "An Innocent Man"

“They need to be stopped. So if it’s not going to be the courts and it’s not going to be the cops, then it’s going to be me. And I hope you.”
- Oliver

We pick up exactly where we left off last week. Oliver has given Diggle the antidote to the poison from Deadshot’s bullets. When Diggle comes to, Oliver is standing there, sans hood, in full Arrow gear. Diggle is kind of confused and tries to punch Oli a few times but isn’t having much luck. Oliver wants Diggle to join him in his quest to rid Starling City of its corrupt, criminal elite. Diggle takes off after calling Oliver a murderer and a criminal. Oliver heads back to the Queen mansion to find Laurel waiting for him. She gives him a talking to about being selfish and self-centered. She leaves and he heads to bed. As he’s trying to sleep, he flashes back to the island. I guess he’s now living with the archer who shot him originally. His newfound friend comes back to their cave with a caged bird. He keeps saying something but Oliver doesn’t speak Chinese so doesn’t know what’s going on. In the present, Oliver wakes up and ends up chatting with Thea downstairs.

The next morning, Oliver comes to the kitchen to find that Diggle has resigned and been replaced by a new guy. He’s kind of an idiot. Oliver manages to give him the slip by asking him to bring the car around and then take off on a motorcycle. Oliver heads to his man cave and starts digging on Peter Declan and Jason Brodeur. Brodeur was Declan’s late wife’s employer and he’s also on Oliver’s list. It turns out that Declan’s wife was going to blow the whistle on the company for illegal dumping. The evidence was stacked against Peter and he was convicted and sentenced to death. Now he’s got 48 hours to live and Oliver is desperately trying to find a way to get him out. So as Arrow, he enlists Laurel’s help. Laurel meets with Peter and learns that he and his wife did fight the night she died but it was about her telling a supervisor about what she’d found.

Meanwhile, over at Queen Consolidated, Walter is a bit distracted and forgets lunch with Moira. Compliance flagged a $2.6 million withdrawal from one of the subsidiaries. Walter tries to brush it off as just an error so as not get Moira upset but there is definitely more to it than that. After Moira admits that she took out the money for a friend’s start-up company, he quietly enlists the IT girl from last week to look into the financials. She finds that the money was used to buy an old warehouse. When Walter goes there, he’s in for a huge shock. We all thought the Queen’s Gambit was lost at sea but it’s sitting there in the warehouse.

Over at the precinct, Laurel is getting her dad to help out a little on the investigation. She gets the name of the supervisor whom Peter’s wife told about the dumping, even though he testified that she never told him anything. Later, Oliver and new body guard guy show up at Diggle’s sister-in-law’s diner. He has a chat with Diggle where he explains the mission left to him by his father as well as the fact that he more than likely killed Diggle’s brother’s killer the day before. He asks Diggle again to join him and once again gives new guy the slip. We get a bit of comedic timing on Diggle’s part where he basically says “yeah, that’s boy is gone now”.

Laurel confides in her friend that she’s working with Arrow and then heads off for a rooftop meeting with him. She tells him about Peter’s wife’s supervisor and Oliver goes off to interrogate the guy. I have to say his “Arrow” voice is kind of ridiculously low and weird. But anyway, big handcuffing the supervisor to a train track of an oncoming train, Oliver learns that he was paid off and he has a file in his desk at work that Peter’s wife gave him. Oliver delivers the file to Laurel and it seems like she’s warming up to his way of thinking. We get another flashback where Oli tries to snag some of archer guy’s food and all he gets for it is swatted away and hand gestures indicating he should kill the bird in the cage. Oliver gets home and he’s pretty happy that things with Laurel seem to be going well, even if she doesn’t know he is Arrow. There’s another funny bit with new bodyguard guy showing up looking rather tired and annoyed and Oliver just blowing him off.

At the legal aid office, Laurel is working on the case when her dad shows up. They come to blows over her working with Arrow and it seems Detective Lance is less than pleased that his daughter is now lying to him and breaking the law. She heads to court to try and get a stay of execution with the newly discovered evidence but the judge isn’t buying it. Brodeur is starting to panic but his thugs promise him that after her failure in court, Laurel will head to prison to talk to Peter and they’ll take him out before he’s officially executed. Problem solved that way. Laurel tells Arrow that she would need a signed confession at this point to save Peter. So he’s off to get one. He learns about the prison hit going down and manages to stop it from happening. But he loses Laurel’s trust. It seems though he’s gained Diggle’s. After a pep talk from his sister-in-law, he’s changing his tune.

We flash back again to the island where Oliver finally kills the bird and the archer starts speaking in limited English. What he’d been saying before means “survive” and that if Oliver wants to survive, he has to continue to kill. I am interested to see how Oliver takes over the archer’s persona because he’s wearing the same clothes as Oliver is as Arrow. Unfortunately, after Oliver saves Peter’s life and he’s reunited with his daughter, things go downhill. Sure, Diggle is all in, especially since he doesn’t think Oliver is quite prepared for what war does to him. But Detective Lance is reviewing footage from the shooting where Oliver killed Deadshot (Laurel explained he wasn’t in his usual get up) and sees Oliver on surveillance grabbing gear out of the trash can. And so he shows up at Queen central and hauls Oliver off for murder, among other charges.