What happens when the enemy can’t be taken out by an arrow? What happens when the enemy is a substance that turns good people into monsters? What’s a vigilante to do? Arrow opens on a busy night at the club and lots of beautiful people rubbing up against each other on the dance floor. Then there’s a girl, a young and pretty girl, who is clearly having a little too much fun. She’s high. The kind of high that makes you stare at your hands with intense fascination. She spends so much time looking at her hands that she doesn’t realize she was wandered into a busy street and BOOM, she gets hit by a taxi.
Oliver and Tommy are enjoying the recent success of the club when Quentin walks in to tell them about the girl’s death. Not only was she in the club, but the drug she was on was Vertigo. Quentin decides to visit the Count to see if he can provide any intel. The Hood arrives first and throws him around his cell a bit first. Oliver isn’t able to get any information out of him and when Quentin arrives, the Count is just yelling nonsense.
Flashback of the Week
Slade and Shado are comparing bad ass notes by going through some mixed martial arts drills when Oliver picks up her bow. Shado has Oliver start his training by slapping a bowl of water. After a few days and few anecdotes from Shado, Oliver gets sick of slapping water. Shado hands him the bow. Turns out all that slapping has given him enough strength to draw the string back. Is this valid? I’m not sure. But at least his archery training can begin.
Diggle and Deadshot
Diggle is on the hunt for Deadshot. He meets up with a former Army pal to see if she can track down Deadshot’s next target. He cannot move on from the death of his brother and since Deadshot is the killer, Diggle is out for revenge. He skips the drug deal and Oliver gets concerned about this latest distraction.
Vertigo Returns
The city gets fed an extra large dose of Vertigo 2.0. It’s more lethal and more addictive. Oliver starts thinking that someone else is to blame since the Count is too unstable and then, the Count escapes the asylum. Uh oh. Crazy man on the loose. But he broke out after the girl died. So who was helping him on the outside? The last text from the girl’s phone was to Tommy. Also, there seems to be $10,000 missing from the club’s books. Could he be dealing to his clients? Quentin decides to confront Tommy at the home he shares with Laurel. He tells her that he’s just doing his job. And she tells Tommy not to say another word, so she’s doing hers as well.
Diggle deals some Vertigo and places trackers in the money used in the sale. This will bring Oliver to the source. Oliver follows the trackers to the site of a deal. Just as a group of junkies hands over a wad of cash, Oliver shoots an arrow through a brick of pills. He blows up the car and ruins the deal. Just as Oliver returns to the office, a junkie high on Vertigo takes a bunch of hostages at gun point in the middle of an aquarium.
Quentin gets a warrant to search the club after finding out that Tommy bribed a city official with $10,000 to avoid the inspection of the club. They get Oliver to open up his office and nothing is found. Luckily, Tommy covered everything up with chairs and boxes to make it look like their storage space.
Felicity pulls the autopsy report of the aquarium junkie and compares it to the autopsy of the girl from the club. It turns out that the Vertigo upgrade includes an antipsychotic component, which is what caused the deaths. This leads Oliver to the conclusion that the Count never escaped the asylum. He’s staying there and the escape was a lie and a cover to shift the focus away from the asylum, where the drugs are being made and distributed from. Once he busts in, it’s clear that the doctors are behind this whole operation. They attack Oliver and clunk him in the head. He wakes up tied to a bed and the doctor force feeding him Vertigo. Luckily, he has the reversal drug and is able to detonate the small explosives in his bag as a diversion. He busts out of his shackles an injects himself with the reversal before he gets too hazy. Diggle comes in just in time to take out doc number two. Oliver takes out doc number one with an arrow to the chest.
When he returns to the club, two things change. Tommy decides that the tension and lack of trust between he and Oliver is too much. He quits the club and runs back to his dad for a job. Then, Oliver decides that he needs to offer the same support to Diggle that he has been getting from him. Oliver’s efforts will now go towards tracking Deadshot down and settling the score.
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(Image courtesy of the CW)
Contributing Writer, BuddyTV
