Arrow 1.19: "Unfinished Business"

“This guy didn’t fail the city. The city failed him, and so did I.”
- Oliver

This week begins with a crowd dancing at Verdant. One girl in particular looks pretty out of it. She leaves the club and ends up getting hit by a car. Oli and Tommy are pretty excited that they are actually making money with the club. And they think it’s kind of funny that their lost-and-found consists of ladies’ underwear. Their good mood sours when Detective Lance shows up about the dead girl. Both guys deny knowing her or that anyone is pushing drugs from the club (she was on Vertigo). This obviously pisses Oliver off. Both he and Lance pay a visit to the Count in the mental institution but neither gets anywhere.

Back on the island, Slade and Shadow (the Archer’s daughter) are sparring while Oli watches. Oli notes that as cool as they are at being bad-ass, they need to come up with a plan to rescue the Archer and stop the baddie. But instead, Shadow is going to train him to use the compound bow without making it snap and killing him.

Meanwhile, Diggle is still brooding over Floyd Lawton’s continued existence in the land of the living. He can’t even read a bedtime story to his nephew he’s so distracted. His conversation with his sister-in-law is cut short by Oli to fill him in on the latest Vertigo crisis. Oli has just enough time to tell Dig about his visit where the Count was pretty much a babbling idiot when Felicity arrives and shows them news footage that says the Count escaped from lock up. As Detective Lance and his partner are leaving the mental hospital, his partner reveals the dead girl tested Tommy right before she died. So Detective Lance will bite the bullet and question him. Plus $10,000 is missing from the operating budget. Tommy denies everything and Laurel gets all defensive lawyer girlfriend for him.

Thanks to some racial stereotyping, Diggle scores some Vertigo so that the tracked bills they used can be followed to the source. Oli heads out after it and breaks up a gathering of homeless guys trying to buy some. We flash back to the island briefly, where Shadow makes Oli slap a bowl of water repeatedly. After doing this for quite a while (and telling him a story about a boy who went to a monastery and came home able to break a table in half thanks to doing exactly what5 Oli is), he strengthens his arm enough to actually use the bow. She doesn’t entirely know what the bad guy is planning but she knows it involves her father taking the fall (just like he did with the Chinese government).

Oli gets back to the man cave just in time to hear a guy’s taken hostages at the aquarium and witnesses said he took green and purple pills. Oli heads off after making an antidote. He tells Felicity to call Diggle because he’s going to need back up. Diggle is off meeting with an old military contact with the hopes that the special forces can track down Lawton and his handler and remove them from the equation permanently. He ignores Felicity’s call. Oliver gets to the aquarium but it’s too late the save the guy. Meanwhile, Lance shows up at the club, sniffing around about where the $10,000 went and saying he wants to inspect the building. Tommy tells him to come back with a warrant. And so he does. The sublevel wasn’t listed on the plans but according to county records something is down there. We know obviously it’s Oli’s man cave of arrow awesomeness. With some quick thinking on Tommy’s end, he’s converted the man cave to a storage facility for all the alcohol. Even with the save, Tommy and Olive have a bit of a fight. Tommy is pissed that Oli would think he’d still deal drugs (he’s really changed his life around the last six months). And Oli’s anger transfers over to Diggle’s quest to find Lawton. He could have used backup at the aquarium. Oli thinks Diggle’s personal vendetta should be on hold while Vertigo is running rampant in the city again. Diggle has a point. Oli should understand where Diggle is coming from, especially since his problem with Vertigo is also personal.

Felicity checks the autopsy reports for both victims and finds they had high levels of an anti-psychotic drug in their system. Oli figures out that it’s a new type of Vertigo and heads back to the mental institution because he now believes the Count never left the premises. Well he turns out to be partly right. The Count never left the hospital. But he’s not the mastermind behind the new version of Vertigo either. He really is a vegetable babbling about nonsense. Unfortunately, Oli gets knocked out by the treating physician and strapped down. Oli comes to and the doctor and his orderly henchman (because everyone needs one right?) are musing about how no one will be surprised that Oliver Queen died of a drug overdose. The doctor gives a little evil speech of evil whereby he explains he reverse engineered the drug from samples taken from the Count’s liver (ew). The doctor force feeds the drug to Oli but he’s fast enough to get his antidote into himself and puke up the stuff before it really has a chance to take effect. And this time, Diggle does have his back. They take out the doctor and his henchman (Diggle zaps his head with paddles from a defibrillator). But in the end, Oli doesn’t have it in him to kill the Count. He’s just so pitiful and in this state he really can’t hurt anyone anymore.

Later, Laurel joins her dad for a non-alcoholic drink at the bar to tell him they are still okay. And she’s proud that he’s starting to deal with his drinking. Meanwhile, Tommy quits running Verdant and runs back to Daddy for a job. As much as it worried me that Tommy could spill the beans to Laurel about Oliver’s identity as Arrow, it worries me far more that he can now tell Malcolm. I don’t know a lot of the Green Arrow mytholo0gy but from what I’ve heard Tommy may end up Oli’s actual enemy.