Arrow Review/Recap: Season 2 Premiere "City of Heroes"

Megan Miller ’17/ Emertainment Montly Staff
The season premiere of Arrow opens with Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Richards) and John Diggle (David Ramsey) on an unstable aircraft, with no vigilante billionaire in sight.  The first dialogue is exchanged humorously between the two of them, but the amusement only lasts until Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell), the Hood himself, shows up to save the day.
It seems that following the death of his best friend and the manmade earthquake that leveled a good portion of his hometown of Starling City in the first season finale, Oliver has hung up his hood and stranded himself on the island that he escaped from just a year earlier.  When his friends find him he insists that he’s not coming back, not after he’s failed, and only agrees when he finds out that the Hood isn’t needed—he is.  His mother is in jail and awaiting trial, his family’s company is about to undergo a hostile takeover by cold and untrustworthy Isabel Rochev (Summer Glau) with whom he ends up in a partnership, and his under-drinking-age sister has taken over management of his club and bar.

Unfortunately that’s not the last of his problems.  The city very quickly falls under attack from some more vigilantes, ones who work in his honor but who do not have his restraint.  Though he refuses to don the hood again to stop them, he is uneasy with their actions, especially when his friend and former love-interest Laurel Lance (Katie Cassidy) gets caught in the crosshairs.  Speaking of Laurel, she complicates matters as well by addressing their first-season romance and underlying issues right off the bat.  She tells him him just minutes after having a gun pointed at her head that sleeping with him had been a mistake (not to mention the fact that she inadvertently blames him—through the Hood—for Tommy’s death, and now that she works with the Starling City District Attorney’s office, she plans to do everything in her power to bring him to justice.  Ouch).  Over Tommy’s gravestone later, however, they agree that they’ve been through too much together to back out of each other’s lives completely.
Meanwhile, with Moira Queen (Susanna Thompson) in prison, Thea Queen (Willa Holland), Oliver’s younger sister, is adamant about her aversion to her.  She’s “put together” as Oliver says he likes to see her, far from her drug days of last season.  With her mother behind bars and her brother gone, she’s taken over the role of the responsible Queen.  She’s running the bar, walking the straight and narrow, and trying very hard to convince her boyfriend, Roy Harper (Colton Haynes), to walk it with her.  However, his vigilante days (or nights) are just beginning, as he sneaks out to stop crimes from happening in what is left in the Glades, while not working as a bartender for his girlfriend.
Dark with just a touch of humor, the season premiere of Arrow has set up for this season with a time jump of five months for our heroes and Starling City to cope with the tragedy, a brand new corporate bad girl, and a brand new player that I won’t spoil for you—but this new player comes almost literally out of nowhere, so you definitely won’t see it coming.