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On the island, Oliver wakes up with the arrow in his chest and Yao Fei says he shot Oliver to protect him and that it’s too dangerous to be alone because “they” will kill him. After a present day workout session, Oliver goes after James Holder, a man responsible for several deaths via defective smoke detectors; however, Deadshot watches from afar and shoots Holder. Thinking that Deadshot has no code of honor, Oliver places him at the top of his list.
Oliver brings Tommy and Diggle to the warehouse, telling them he wishes to open a nightclub there. Tommy suggests they check out the competition, and while at a club, they run into Laurel and Thea. For revenge against Oliver, the owner takes him and Tommy to a back room, letting his minions loose on them. Tommy knocks some men down, and Laurel comes in to finish it off. Later, Tommy convinces Laurel that their relationship is worth a chance because he’ll become someone worthy of her. Laurel mentions that Oliver knew about them before Thea spilled it at the club.
Oliver busts into Deadshot’s room, but Deadshot escapes, leaving behind his computer, which Oliver takes to I.T. woman Felicity Smoak. She tells him it actually belongs to Mr. Patel, a man in competition with Walter Steele for Unidac Industries. Realizing he can’t protect everyone on his own, Arrow warns Detective Lance about Deadshot’s impending attack. Deadshot fires on the Unidac auction and Oliver rushes away, grabbing conveniently hidden gear. Arrow and Deadshot have a weapons battle, ending with an arrow through Deadshot’s eye. Arrow takes a wounded Diggle to his base, saves him with a potion, and reveals his identity.
Tropes applying to this Episode:
- Absurdly Dedicated Worker: Despite threatening to resign if Oliver kept ditching him, Diggle keeps trying to bodyguard this rich white moron he's stuck with. Likely the assassination attempt in the previous episode where they both saved each others lives had a lot to do with it.
- A Friend in Need: Oliver and Tommy are being pounded on by bouncers, but Oliver can't fight without giving himself away. It's Laurel who comes to their aid, despite cold-shouldering them moments before.
- And I Must Scream: Deadshot's poison, curare, is real
, and it does kill by paralysis. However, you don't need a blood transfusion to survive it, just artificial respiration (no chest compression, as it doesn't affect the heart) until it wears off. It's compared to locked-in syndrome on the other wiki, the real-life And I Must Scream condition.- Though the blood transfusion was likely due to the bullet wound itself rather than to treat the poison.
- Antagonist Title: The title obviously refers to Deadshot, the lone assassin who killed the brother of our protagonist's bodyguard and is now back in Starling to take some high profile targets.
- Arc Words: Poison is mentioned a few times, referring to both the actual poison Curare and the name of the club that Oliver, Tommy, Laurel, Thea and technically Diggle will attend. Both are very important to the plot.
- Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Thea drops the teen brat act and comes along to a social event with her mother, after she makes a genuine attempt to patch things up with her daughter.
- Bad Liar:
- Ollie begins his Running Gag of ridiculously flimsy cover stories to Felicity.
Oliver: I spilled coffee on my laptop.
Felicity: It's got bullet holes.
Oliver: My coffee shop's in a bad neighborhood.- Laurel claims she was just surfing the net. She's not interested in Oliver. She's over him.
- Blatant Lies:
- Oliver sees Felicity Smoak from IT for help repairing his laptop that got damaged from a coffee spill. The laptop is full of bulletholes and contains information that Oliver clearly doesn't know until Felicity shows it to him.
- Diggle tells Carly his bodyguard job is a cakewalk, when his client keeps ditching him despite an attempted kidnapping and Triad hit. Carly is not convinced since her husband (Diggle's brother) was killed doing the same job.
- Oliver carelessly expresses frustration to Diggle that Deadshot has not made his move yet, then makes an unconvincing claim that he heard the information on the radio. In retrospect, he's clearly sounding out Diggle for the upcoming reveal about who he really is.
- Book Ends: The episode begins and ends with someone getting poisoned with Curare and being taken to the lair to be cured.
- The Bro Code:
- Tommy apologizes profusely to Oliver for sleeping with Laurel. Dead or alive, Oliver was his friend and that is not done.
- Tommy points out that the waitress at the diner is rather hot. Diggle points out that she's his sister in law. Tommy points out that he will never ever look at or say anything about her ever again ever not even a little bit ever.
- Caught in a Snare: Island!Oliver wakes up in Yao Fei's cave to find him asleep, so takes the opportunity to flee only to come across one of these constructed from parachute cord. Fortunately Yao Fei finds him before the black-clad soldiers who set up the trap do.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- When Oliver pulls his equipment out of a trash can in a stairwell, there's a brief moment when he pulls his hood out of the bag before taking off. That shot will turn up in the following episode when Detective Lance goes through surveillance footage to hunt the Hood.
- Deadshot's tattoos are names of his victims that he murdered, and that includes Andrew Diggle.
- Continuity Snarl: In this episode, Deadshot's Andrew Diggle tattoo is located in his left pecs. In future episodes, it's near his collar area.
- Debut Queue: The episode marks the debut of Felicity Smoak, Deadshot, Carly Diggle and the Bratva.
- Ditch the Bodyguards: Happens off-screen with Oliver doing the Bathroom Breakout version.Diggle: So how was your evening, sir?Oliver: You mean after I said I had to go to the bathroom at dinner and never came back?
- Diving Save: Quentin saving Walter from Deadshot.
- Dull Surprise: That Oliver didn't react to Thea's shocking announcement that Tommy and Laurel slept together is taken as evidence by Laurel that he already knew (having overheard them talking in the pilot episode).
- Early-Installment Weirdness: Laurel saves Tommy and Oliver from a beating by quite handily taking out Max Fuller, with punches and elbows to the kidney, then taking out his knee, saying Det. Lance made her take self defense classes. These capabilities will vanish later.
- Eye Scream: Oliver takes Deadshot down with an arrow to the eye.
- Female Gaze: Practically invoked via Freeze-Frame Bonus. You can pause if you want to view all the tattoo names on Deadshot's body, which he shows while on a Shirtless Scene.
- The First Cut Is the Deepest: Joanna calls out Laurel on how the only relationship she's had since Oliver supposedly died was with Oliver's BFF, Tommy Merlyn.
- Foreshadowing:
- In a Freeze-Frame Bonus, you'll see that one of Deadshot's past victims is Andrew Diggle. Oliver later notices that Diggle's sister-in-law is not wearing a wedding ring...
- Laurel, dressed in black, beating the shit out of someone.
- An angry Thea tells Oliver that he's "barely her brother"...
- When the Vigilante accuses Deadshot of only killing for himself, Floyd Lawton gives a wry smile.
- Go Through Me: Done by Tommy when the owner of the club they're attending attempts to give Oliver a payback for ruining his wedding in the past. This is despite the fact that he's talking to a couple of large bouncers.
- Healing Herb: Oliver learned on the Island how to make herbs that can cure curare poisoning and help recover from an arrow through the chest.
- Human Notepad: Floyd Lawton tattoos the names of his kills on his body.
- Hypocrisy Nod: Thea, Moira and Oliver himself are well aware of the irony of Oliver judging Thea for her delinquent lifestyle.
- I Can Change My Beloved: Inverted by Tommy who offers to change his behaviour to make himself the kind of man that Laurel would be interested in starting a relationship with.
- Impersonating an Officer: Quentin is checking in with his units covering the towers that Deadshot could use to make his shot. Unit 5 is answered by Deadshot himself.
- Ineffectual Death Threat: Alexi Leonov warns that if Oliver's credentials with the Bratva don't check out, he'll send his 'mechanic' to kill him and his family. Oliver just looks at the mechanic, who's nervously rubbing the finger Oliver broke while removing his firearm.
- Internal Reveal: The episode where Diggle finds out that Oliver is the Vigilante.
- Jerkass Has a Point:
- Thea may be bratty but she has a point that Oliver hasn't let anyone in since he came back.
- The guy who owns the club that Oliver and company attends still resents him for ruining his wedding when he nailed his fiancée during the rehearsal dinner.
- Yao Fei's Attack Hello nearly kills Oliver, but it's later revealed that he has good reason to be wary of strangers. Island!Oliver's life is also in danger and nothing gets that point across like getting an arrow through the chest.
- Just You and Me and My GUARDS!: Holder tries this only for the Hood to reveal he's knocked out all the guards.
- Kick the Dog: Thea outs Tommy and Laurel's past sexual relationship purely as a Take That! to her brother for complaining about her own friends.
- Killed Mid-Sentence: A variation where the person being spoken to is the one killed, when Holden gets shot just as the Hood is telling him, "James Holden, you have--"
- Kill Tally: Unlike his comic counterpart, Deadshot tattoos the names of each of his victims onto himself upon completion of a job. Given that this is what the police call "evidence" it's done purely for Rule of Cool and to introduce a Chekhov's Gun.
- Knight in Sour Armor: Diggle tears apart Oliver's idea of some Mighty Whitey gentrifying the Glades.
- Laser Sight: On Deadshot's rifle.
- Let Us Never Speak of This Again: Tommy's response to having their asses saved by Laurel at the nightclub.
- Little Black Dress: Laurel and Thea during the club scenes. It's probably the theme that night as the guys are mostly dressed in black too.
- The Mafiya: After discovering that Deadshot's ammunition was supplied by the Bratva, Oliver goes to their local chapter in Starling City for information. For reasons as yet unrevealed, Oliver is a Captain in their organisation.
- Moe Greene Special: Deadshot with an arrow to the eyepiece.
- Mythology Gag:
- Laurel's fighting in the episode clearly hints to her becoming Black Canary.
- The land of Markovia is mentioned. It is the home of Brion and Tara Markov, better known as Geo-Force of The Outsiders and Terra of the Teen Titans in the DC Universe.
- Big Belly Burger is an established chain from the DCU with its first appearance coming back in 1988 with Adventures of Superman #441.
- There is also a reference to Corto Maltese, which was a location mentioned in 1989′s Batman (1989) as well as the “Justice” episode of Smallville. It's also the location of the nuclear conflict in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. It comes into this show proper in season 3.
- The room where Deadshot is staying is room 52, an arc number in the DCU.
- Deadshot has his eyepiece and his wrist-cannon.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
- Oliver complaining to his mother about her Hands-Off Parenting with Thea causes them both to turn up at the auction where Deadshot is about to strike.
- Oliver ditches Diggle purely to troll him, as he's entering a nightclub rather than donning the green hood, only to get beaten up by the bouncers inside because he can't afford to give away his fighting skills.
- Phoney Call: When a member of The Mafiya calls with information, Oliver answers in Russian, then asks his friend Tommy Merlyn for some privacy claiming it's a Russian model he's dating. Tommy muses that he now knows why Oliver is taking the news that Tommy slept with Laurel so calmly.
- Police Are Useless: Zizagged; knowing he can't cover all the possible firing points, Oliver tips off Quentin about the upcoming hit. But Deadshot just takes out the officer covering his sniper position, and Oliver is able to get there faster than Quentin's men.
- Refuge in Audacity: The Vigilante approaches Detective Lance by twisting his arm across the hood of a police car, right outside the police station.
- Rule of Pool: James Holder's suite, leading to Blood Is Squicker in Water.
- Running Gag:
- Oliver begins his trend of Blatant Lies to Felicity.
- Tommy is once again at the bad end of the My Sister Is Off-Limits trope. This time with Diggle's sister-in-law, Carly.
- Oliver ditches Diggle two more times, first with a Bathroom Breakout and then by refusing to vouch for him when entering the nightclub.
- Self Stitching: Subverted when Oliver stitches up the wound Deadshot gave him, only for his vision to blur because the bullet was poisoned. He barely makes it to his stash of herbs in time.
- Scope Snipe: Oliver does this by accident against Deadshot, who wears a sniper scope over his eye in this continuity. Oliver takes cover behind a wall and Deadshot pins him down with gunfire. Oliver fires an arrow around the corner without aiming and the firing suddenly cuts off. He goes to see what happened and finds Deadshot lying on the ground - apparently dead - with an arrow sticking out of his aiming lens.
- Shirtless Scene: Oliver per usual, and Deadshot.
- Shout-Out:
- James Holder's corpse floating in his swimming pool is a nod to both Sunset Boulevard and The Great Gatsby.
- The local Bratva chapter has a mechanic as a hitman.
- Snark-to-Snark Combat: While being grilled by Detective Lance, who virtually accuses him of hiring Deadshot, Walter shows he can give as good as he gets.
- Standard Female Grab Area: Averted; Oliver tries to haul Thea out of the nightclub, but she angrily shoves him away.Thea: Keep your hands off of me! You're not my father, and you're barely my brother.
- Stealth Insult: Diggle gives a great one to Oliver, who picks up on it right away and doesn't take offense.Oliver: Wow. You don't think very highly of me, do you?Diggle: Actually sir, I have a very high regard for how perceptive you are.
- Super Window Jump: Deadshot does this to escape the Hood, while the Hood does this to burst in on Deadshot later.
- Tempting Fate: Laurel's friend hauls her off to a nightclub so she can get her mind off Oliver. Guess who turns up at the same nightclub.
- The Stinger: On the island, we see the first appearance of the commandos hunting Yao Fei. In the present, Oliver has brought Diggle to his Arrowcave and revealed his identity as the Hood.
- Tattooed Crook:
- Deadshot. Holy shit, Deadshot.
- Turns out that tattoo on Oliver's chest means he's a Captain in The Mafiya.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Oliver chews out his mother for "giving Thea her space" because when he was Thea's age, he could have used "a little less space, and a little more parenting".
- Villain Respect: Deadshot shows appreciation for the Hood's "work", and says they aren't that different. Oliver is not amused by the comparison.
- White Shirt of Death:
- James Holder was killed while wearing his bathrobe.
- Island!Oliver is wearing a lightly-colored shirt that shows off the blood from where Yao Fei put an arrow through him.
- A white-jacketed waiter catches the bullet meant for Walter.
- You Are Grounded!: Moira tries this but Thea walks out anyway, given that she's used to Mum just paying off shop owners for her illegal antics.
