Back to the Recap Page.
Felicity's past comes back to haunt her in several ways, as her estranged mother comes to visit, and a hacker group terrorizes the city with a supervirus Felicity designed in her college years.
Tropes in this episode:
- A Day in the Limelight: First Felicity-centric episode.
- Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: Felicity's mom who has a habit of meeting current and former bosses and thoroughly embarrassing her.
- Answer Cut: After a montage showing most of the members of the cast training, Thea asks, "What do normal people do in the morning?" Cut to a shot of Felicity doing five sit-ups to a workout video, then brushing her teeth.
- Call-Back: Regarding Felicity's ex-lover coming back from the dead, Oliver says he's had some prior experience of that.
- Calling the Old Woman Out: Felicity rips into her mother in the guise of a "I'm sorry I'm not like you" speech.
- Chekhov's Gun: The smart-wearable watch Ray gave to Donna.
- Cuteness Proximity: Donna's response to baby Sara, so Team Arrow decide to hand the baby over to her while dealing with the crisis.
- Cut the Juice:
- Brother Eye announces his presence with a citywide power cut.
- In the flashback, Felicity does this when Cooper refuses to stop hacking the Department of Education despite her warnings.
- Damsel out of Distress: Felicity hacks her mother's wifi signal (on the smartwatch Palmer gave her) to contact Oliver. Then she disarms and beats up Cooper before he could shoot her. She's come a long way from her previous Non Action Girl status.
- Disappeared Dad: Felicity's dad left her and her mother when she was young.
- Do Not Adjust Your Set: Brother Eye announcing his reign of terror.
- Dramatic Irony:
- While in college, Cooper asks if Felicity wants to grow up to be a hacker or a hero. Turns out with Team Arrow she can be both.
- Cooper blames Felicity for 'selling out' when it was his own supposed death that turned her off hacktivism.
- Last year Thea played a role in ensuring her half-brother went bankrupt, whereas she's now rich thanks to him 'killing' her father the year before.
- Evil Former Friend: Though Cooper was already down a dark path, he was still Felicity's boyfriend before, and was willing to take the fall for her supervirus. Now he's a full-blown cyberterrorist with zero respect for her.
- Faking the Dead: Cooper Seldon faked his death in prison to get to work with the NSA.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: Felicity has an Oh, Crap! reaction after Donna tells her she got a free plane ticket to Starling City in the email. Seconds later masked men kick open the door and force them both into Bag of Kidnapping.
- A Friend in Need: Ray Palmer offers emotional support for a distraught Felicity, and even quietly departs when asked. Later he accepts Felicity's Blatant Lies about being sick so she can spend so time with her mother before she leaves.
- Foe Cooties: Felicity finds it creepy that the Villain of the Week was her ex-lover.
- Foreshadowing:
- Donna says to Cooper, "I know without that gun, you wouldn't last 10 seconds against my girl." Once Cooper is disarmed, even Felicity has no trouble taking him down.
- Roy mentions that he hasn't been getting much sleep. With the dreams he's been having, it's easy to see why...
- Donna's concern that her daughter might have inherited traits from her Disappeared Dad rather than her makes a lot more sense when it's revealed Felicity's father was a cybercriminal as well.
- Former Teen Rebel: Back in college Felicity, Cooper and Myron formed a hacktivist group. Years later, Felicity works as an IT tech in Queen Consolidated and Myron heads an IT group for an accounting firm (and drives a hybrid). Cooper even criticizes Felicity for "selling out".
- Friend or Foe?: One of the automatic machine guns shoots the other as it's aiming at Oliver.
- "Friends" Rent Control: Oliver is not amused to find that Thea can afford her spacious loft (and to buy back Verdant) because she's Malcolm Merlyn's heir and therefore inherited his wealth, given that he's officially dead. Of course it's just as likely Malcolm is giving her the money under the table.
- Hidden Depths: Donna's ditzy behavior is initially played for laughs. Not so when the chips are down.Donna: You want to wave that gun at me, fine, but don't you dare threaten my daughter.Cooper: Here I thought you were all nails and hair.Donna: Try single mom who's worked 60 hour weeks in six inch heels for tips in order to raise that genius child you see right there.
- Hypocrisy Nod: When Oliver asks Felicity why she didn't fill them in on her hacktivist past, Felicity points out they barely know a fraction of what happened to Oliver in the five years he was away.
- I Have Your Wife: Brother Eye arranged for Donna to win a free ticket to Starling City, knowing she would use it to visit her daughter. He then kidnaps them both and uses mom as a hostage to force Felicity's cooperation.
- Improbable Aiming Skills: Even Roy can't believe it when he fires an arrow to disable an RPG launcher just as it's about to be fired.
- Interrupted Intimacy: College!Felicity is snogging Cooper when a Van in Black pulls up and he's arrested by the FBI.
- Ironic Echo: Oliver repeats what Thea told him about loving your family in spite of everything. It would be a Meaningful Echo were it not for the implication that Thea was repeating something that Malcolm Merlyn said to her.
- I Want Grandkids: Implied; Felicity rants over her mother's constant interest in her (lack of a) love life, while Donna is quite pleased her daughter is on friendly terms with not one, but two handsome billionaires.
- Keeping Secrets Sucks: Lampshaded by Quentin who realises Laurel is bottling something up. He advises her to tell someone else if he can't tell him what's bothering her. So she talks about Sara's murder to her boxing instructor Ted Grant.
- Kingpin in His Gym: One of the opening training montages is Malcolm and Thea sword fighting.
- Like Mother, Unlike Daughter as in Wacky Parent, Serious Child: Everyone has a bemused reaction to Felicity's ditzy Hopeless with Tech mom, with Ray wondering if she was adopted. Later Donna says she fears that all the good things about her daughter she got from her father, but Felicity admits that her strength to keep going no matter what—which has been invaluable over the past two years—she got from her mother rather than a father who chose to give up and abandon her.
- Mirror Scare: Myron turns off a monitor, and the suddenly dark screen reflects the Arrow and Roy Harper standing behind him.
- My God, What Have I Done?: The cyberterrorist attack brings out a lot of guilt issues in Felicity, not only over creating the supervirus but the death of her boyfriend after he used it to erase student loan records.
- Mythology Gag
- Brother Eye is also the name of an AI satellite that helped O.M.A.C., but eventually went rogue. Myron Forest was its creator.
- Diggle mentions Lyla being on assignment in Santa Prisca, the island where Bane made his base of operations.
- In the flashback, Cooper is wearing a t-shirt with an alien on it that looks a lot like Starro.
- "Secret Origins" was the title of the three-part Pilot Episode of Justice League and multiple comic book series showing the origins of various DC characters.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Laurel sends a riot team to the bank, escalating an already tense situation. Quentin ends up giving her a What the Hell, Hero? for her reckless decision.
- Non-Action Guy: The episode starts with former non-action girls Thea and Laurel training vigorously to become deadly fighters, and then it cuts to Felicity doing a workout video. At the end of the episode, she breaks out of the trope briefly by disarming Cooper and freeing herself from danger.
- Not in Front of the Kid: Diggle has Baby Sara with him because Lyla is elsewhere, but Oliver doesn't want her down in the Arrowcave to Diggle's bemusement, as it's not as if a baby is going to reveal the location of their secret lair.
- One Dialogue, Two Conversations: Oliver is in this situation with Thea, thanks to him not knowing she's secretly meeting her father. He wants her to stop using Malcolm Merlyn's money, while to her it's not about the money—it's about accepting her father despite his crimes. This causes tension at a time when the two siblings are trying to repair their relationship with each other.Thea: Someone told me recently that a family is pretty precious. And love, in spite of everything, is what makes it precious. Right now, the Queen family is just you and me.Oliver: So let it just be you and me. And don't take Merlyn's money.Thea: I'm trying to meet you halfway here, Ollie. The other half is up to you. (walks off)
- Out Of The Shadows Reveal: Cooper showing he's Not Quite Dead.
- Police Are Useless: An ESU riot squad is despatched to guard the bank, but this only incites the crowd outside. Oliver and Roy are able to disperse them with a few tear gas arrows (seriously, the police don't have tear gas?)
- Pragmatic Adaptation: In keeping with the show's more grounded realism, Brother Eye is a group of hackers rather than a rogue AI.
- Red Herring: Felicity's former college friend Myron, who then claims to have shown Felicity's supervirus to some people back in college whose names he can't remember. Before Felicity has a chance to track them down, she's kidnapped and discovers her former boyfriend is still alive.
- Rule of Threes: Invoked when Brother Eye (unaware he's a just Villain of the Week) announces himself as the third cataclysm to strike Starling City after earthquake and siege.
- Sentry Gun: Cooper has several motion-sensor guided machine guns set up in his lair, but Oliver can move faster than they can track him, and he's able to destroy each in turn.
- Significant Wardrobe Shift: In the final flashback, College!Felicity changes from her Perky Goth look into her current appearance—dying her hair and getting rid of her clothes—to leave behind the lifestyle that got her boyfriend arrested and killed.
- Shout-Out:
- Felicity's Goth look in college makes her look like Death of the Endless.
- Cooper Seldon's name is a shout-out to The Big Bang Theory. His personality? Not so much.
- Cooper and Felicity played Zork in college, with the obligatory reference to being eaten by a grue.
- A former radical plans an elaborate terrorist act to cover for theft.
- At the end, Oliver and Thea sit down to watch a movie together in Thea's ridiculously huge apartment: Possessed (1931), starring Joan Crawford and Clark Gable.
- Brother Eye's logo
◊ looks very similar to the Eye of Sauron.
- Single Mom Stripper: Felicity's mom worked as a cocktail waitress to support them after her dad left.
- Sinister Surveillance: As Thea watches movies with her brother in her new apartment, Malcolm Merlyn is shown watching them from a nearby building.
- Start of Darkness: Cooper's attempt to eradicate student loans is the first step in his development into a member/leader of Brother Eye.
- Taking the Heat: After Cooper is arrested, Felicity says she will tell the authorities that she wrote the supervirus, only for Cooper to reveal that he's already copped to it to protect Felicity. Ironically this action got Cooper recruited by the NSA, but as they faked his death to get him out of prison, Felicity carries a lot of guilt over this.
- Tastes Like Friendship: Thea demands that Oliver start meeting her halfway in her efforts to repair their relationship, so he turns up with a large bag of popcorn and they watch a movie while sitting together on the floor (the furniture hasn't been unpacked yet).
- Tempting Fate:
- Cooper in the past keeps saying that no one will ever catch him or find out he was behind the Department of Education hack. About a second later the FBI shows up.
- Cooper locks down the computer so Felicity can't contact the police. He never said she couldn't contact the Arrow.
- Training Montage: The episode opens with scenes of Oliver training Roy in stickfighting, Laurel learning boxing, and Merlyn teaching Thea swordfighting—to fast-paced dramatic music. It's there to set up the Answer Cut.
- Wham Shot: Roy's Catapult Nightmare at the end, in which he's the one who killed Sara.
- Whole Costume Reference: Felicity's Goth look in college is exactly the same, barring a lack of pale skin, as Death of the Endless.
- You Are in Command Now: Laurel has become acting DA to handle the crisis, given that the DA is out of town.
