Recap / Arrow S 4 E 3 Restoration

The boys are back.

Season 4, Episode 3:

Restoration

Laurel and Thea travel to Nanda Parbat in order to seek help for Thea and to convince Malcolm to resurrect Sara. Back in Star City, the rest of the team confronts a metahuman brought in by HIVE to kill the Green Arrow.

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• A House Divided: Oliver goes to take on a robbery without Diggle and is nearly killed by Double Down. This is because Diggle has gone to take on Fayid; he in turn is nearly killed by her bodyguards because Oliver isn't backing him up.
• After Action Patch Up: Oliver is shown wincing at the treatment, showing how he's unwound somewhat from the stoic façade he would have put on in the early seasons. It's also not played for the usual Ship Tease, with Felicity roasting Oliver and Diggle for getting injured in the first place.
• All for Nothing: All that effort by Oliver to stop his sister from becoming a killer. Not only does Thea kill consciously for the first time (taking open enjoyment in the act) but she has to keep doing so as the bloodlust will return in just a few weeks.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: Double Down breaks into Palmer Tech and attacks Felicity and Curtis, then follows them when they flee down to the lair in the building's subbasement. As a longer term problem, Team Arrow can't be certain that he didn't tell Darhk where to find the lair, so now they'll have to relocate it. Luckily Ollie has a surprise just for this occasion.
• Always a Bigger Fish: Darhk actually offers Double Down money to kill him, but when he tries Darhk suspends the thrown card in mid-air using his magic, then tosses it into Fayid's neck. He then turns it back on Double Down stopping just before his throat. Double Down gets the message, and when Team Arrow capture him refuses to give up Darhk, pointing out that he's more scared of him than our heroes.
• Artistic License: Oliver mentioned that the Kevlar in his body armor saved him from Double Down's sharp cards. In reality, kevlar is ideal against bullets, but not sharp projectiles. Some body armor comes with ceramic plates between layers of Kevlar to reduce the force of bullet impacts. That could stop the razor-sharp cards, but it's unclear if Oliver's costume has that.
• A-Team Firing: Felicity admits she has no idea how to use a gun, and just sprays bullets at full auto with her eyes closed. She manages to clip Double Down in the shoulder mostly through sheer luck, which is the point where he decides Star City is more trouble than it's worth.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The prototypes Curtis has been developing to save the company still have a ways to go. From HD contact lenses that cost ten thousand dollars (per lens) to an autonomous comm-ball with a habit of exploding, they're a little hard to market.
• Back from the Dead: Sara is resurrected by the Lazarus Pit, but Came Back Wrong even more than Thea did.
• Bad Boss:
  • Malcolm sets up two of his minions to be killed by Thea, in order to give her a temporary relief from her Pit-induced bloodlust.
  • Darhk once again kills the agents who fail to carry out his orders.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: Fayad reveals that Darhk isn't the only authority figure within HIVE. Rather, he has "partners" with at least enough sway to make decisions without his approval.
• Both Sides Have a Point: Diggle says that Oliver's actions make him wonder if he can ever trust his friend again, while Oliver says that Diggle isn't allowing him the opportunity to win back that trust.
• The Bus Came Back: Mina Fayad, the HIVE agent who hired Deadshot comes to Star City to check up on how Darhk is doing. Turns out she came Back for the Dead.
• Brutal Honesty: Merlyn tells Thea that there's really no cure for her bloodlust, and tells Laurel that there's no guarantee that the Pit could bring Sara back to life and even if it did, Sara won't come back like Laurel thinks she will.
• Call-Back:
  • Felicity, as the CEO of Palmer Tech (formerly Queen Consolidated), enlists the help of Curtis to examine strange items under false pretences and with poorly made excuses—much as Oliver did with her three years earlier. She however cuts to the chase and tells Curtis that she works with Green Arrow (while keeping Ollie's identity a secret).
  • Felicity celebrates the return of "Original Team Arrow", the trio of Oliver, Diggle and Felicity from Season One. Unfortunately it takes a while for the other two to share her enthusiasm.
• Came Back Wrong: Sara's been dead so long, that while the Pit revives her body her soul is left behind.
• Continuity Nod: A few. The Dodger is mentioned, Thea's dip in the Lazarus Pit is once again touched on.
• Damaged Soul:
  • Malcolm explains Thea's problem is that someone using the pit to save their life (or restore it) absorbs fragments of previous users of the pit, which causes a bloodlust until they've taken revenge on the person who injured them. And since Ollie already killed Ra's, the best Thea can do is to go on short killing sprees that will suppress the bloodlust for weeks at a time.
  • Sara doesn't even have a soul when she comes back, since she's been dead so long. But she does start going after Thea, who was one who killed her.
• Dead Guy on Display: Oliver and Diggle track down Fayid's cell phone, only to find her body in a chair inside an Abandoned Warehouse, while Double Down goes to pay Felicity a visit.
• Death Dealer: Double Down tosses razor sharp cards, generated from the tattoos covering his body.
• Death Is Cheap: Averted. Despite the possibility that the Pit can resurrect the dead, it's treated as an untested legend. When it does work on Sara, it's destroyed before it can become a tool to enable Death Is Cheap.
• Did Not Think This Through: Desperate to get back in his daughter's good books, Malcolm Merlyn finally agrees to restore Sara. This is despite knowing that the Lazarus Pit will give Sara an uncontrollable urge to kill the person who killed her, which happens to be Thea. Perhaps he never thought it would work, but it has.
• Do Wrong, Right: Oliver points out that the mercenaries' method of getting information from prisoners (asking a few times, then shooting them and asking someone else) is counterproductive: not only isn't it getting the information, it's killing off the slave labor force. So he offers to nonfatally torture them instead.
• Electromagnetic Ghosts: Felicity keeps getting interference on her phone when she's near the location where Ray Palmer supposedly died, said interference eventually causing her name to appear on the screen.
• Everything Is Online: A particularly ludicrous example when Felicity is able to operate a construction digger remotely, including a shot of the control levers moving by themselves.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: Felicity, when she realizes that Double Down has tracked the card she has Curtis analyzing in the Palmer Tech labs.
• Fantastic Drug: The mercenaries on Lian Yu in the flashbacks are growing plants that are hybrids of heroin and cocaine. The end product has the street name Slam.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Diggle and Oliver finally get over their differences when Oliver takes a shot meant for Diggle.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Nyssa and Merlyn's sparring match at the beginning, and Merlyn using the water of the Lazarus Pit to heal a small cut, while Nyssa watches.
  • A Ghost in the Batman Cold Open has Diggle dead to rights, but chooses to run off instead of shooting him.
  • That small sphere with a T-shaped marking that Curtis is working on.
• I Lied: After she cuts down several League attackers, Thea immediately realizes Malcolm's story about a mage living in the mountains who could help her was complete bullshit. He readily admits it.
• Internal Reveal:
  • Diggle informs Oliver about the connection between his brother's death and HIVE.
  • Circumstances force Felicity to reveal her connection to Green Arrow and their secret HQ to Curtis Holt.
• Ironic Name
  Curtis: Have you ever considered how ironic your name is? "Felicity" refers to the ability to find appropriate expression for one's thoughts, which is not exactly something you're particularly good at.
• I Surrender, Suckers: Double Down pretends to put his hands behind his neck in surrender, only to throw two more cards at the Green Arrow.
• It's All About Me: Laurel goes ahead with reviving Sara with the Lazarus Pit against the advice of Nyssa (Sara's lover), Malcolm (the man who owns the pit), and Thea (the most recent person to be revived by it and exhibiting the side effects). Nyssa in particular accuses Laurel of doing it not out of love for Sara, but a selfish desire to relieve her own grief.
• It's Personal: Diggle is still hellbound on tracking HIVE down for killing his brother.
• Knight Templar Parent: Malcom proves once again how horrible he is at being a father. His idea of helping Thea? Giving her false hope to cure her madness, then set up two of his men to be slaughtered in order to remove it for a few weeks. And he thinks of this as an appropriate long time therapy!
• Land Mine Goes "Click!": Oliver offers to "get rid" of a troublesome prisoner in a way that no one would ever find the body. The mercenaries do not fully trust him so one of them follows him to witness the execution. Since Oliver has no intention of killing the prisoner, he instead leads the mercenary straight into the minefield where the mercenary gets blown up by a mine.
• Missing Floor: There's a subbasement accessed via a secret elevator in the Palmer Technologies building that the board of directors don't know about, because it's being used as the new Arrowcave.
• Mythology Gag: Curtis Holt displays a "communication ball" (which explodes for some reason) that has a T on it: a reference to the tools used by Mr. Terrific and Foreshadowing his becoming the character.
• Noodle Incident: Team Flash has apparently encountered Double Down before (enough for Cisco to give him a nickname), but we don't know the circumstances of the encounter, or how he escaped capture.
• No Man Should Have This Power: Nyssa destroys the Lazarus Pit after Sara's resurrection as she feels Malcolm abused it to bring her back. That Malcolm no longer can use for healing if she wounds or kills him is an added benefit.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Both Ollie and Diggle are absolutely stunned once Felicity loses her shit and tells them to solve their issues already.
• Police Are Useless: Lampshaded.
  Oliver: How useful have the police been at solving the city's problems recently?
  Felicity: ... that's a good point.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Ollie's way to gain the trust of Reiter's men (and also to save the lives of the labourers).
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Felicity explodes at Diggle and Oliver over their continued inability to deal with the problem between them and demands they work it out.
• The Reveal: Darhk had been made out to be the end-all be-all absolute authority of HIVE but this episode reveals that he has partners in the organization that have enough authority to act on their own and that don't exactly hold him in high regard.
• Running Gag: At some point you'd think the mercs would start noticing they've been suffering an explosion of casualties due to landmines since Oliver showed up.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Double Down eventually decides to flee town. Oliver and Diggle intercept him before he gets far, however.
• Shout-Out: Merlyn references Star Trek III: The Search for Spock when he explains about resurrecting Sara from the dead "What you seek has not done since ages past . . . and then, only in legend."
• Story-Breaker Power: A major death having been teased in the Season 4 premiere, the Lazarus Pit is destroyed at the end of this episode to make sure any character who dies from now on, stays dead.
• Taking the Bullet:
  • It's not really a bullet, but rather a metahuman tattoo-converted card. But the same concept works for Oliver shielding Diggle from Double Down. Of course, Double Down seemed to be aiming at Diggle's chest, and both Diggle and Oliver have body armor on from the same source, so Dig would have been fine.
  • Lampshaded when Diggle tells Oliver that there was a time he would have taken a bullet for him, but now he wonders if he still would. Oliver being willing to "take the bullet" for Diggle goes a long way to restoring his trust for Oliver.
    Diggle: You took a bullet for me.
    Oliver: They were meta-human tattoo playing cards.
    Diggle: Still counts, Oliver. Still counts.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Again, Merlyn warns the characters that using the Pit is a really bad idea, and Nyssa vehemently agrees.
• To Make a Long Story Short: For a Motor Mouth Felicity has quite a talent for cutting to the chase.

  Diggle: Sorry I couldn't help out. It's a long story.

  Felicity: Oh, my God, it is not a long story. It is the shortest story in history. Two guys go take on criminals without asking for back-up and nearly get killed in the process!

  • And again when Double Down attacks Felicity and Curtis.
    Felicity: Ok, obviously there's a very long explanation to this. The short version is that I work with the Green Arrow, this man is trying to kill me—well, us, sorry—and I'm taking us down to the only place that we're going to be safe.
• Torture Technician: Oliver impresses Conklin with his abilities as a torturer, claiming that he learned what the body can stand from three years of his own experience dealing with injuries. The culprit is not the man being tortured, but the unnamed woman doctor who confesses to spare Ollie's victim further pain.
• Villainous Breakdown: Malcom's stoic façade immediately cracks upon seeing that Nyssa destroyed the Lazarus Pit and has now a legitimate chance of killing him for real.
• Wall of Weapons: There's a rack of Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns in the new Arrowcave. Felicity helps herself to one.
• Wham Episode: Nyssa destroys the Lazarus Pit to spite Merlyn, not only for bringing Sara back but to make sure he can never come back to life if she kills him.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • Felicity rips into Oliver for taking on a metahuman without backup, to his shock.
  • Oliver is restrained about it, but he does call out Diggle on keeping secrets from him regarding H.I.V.E. when he was angry with Oliver for keeping secrets.
  • Nyssa calls out Laurel for using the Pit on Sara.
• What the Hell Are You?: Double Down on seeing Darhk's magic.
• You Called Me "X"; It Must Be Serious: Despite saying that she would never again be Malcolm Merlyn's daughter, Thea uses her status as the daughter of the current Ra's to gain admittance to Nanda Parbat, and more importantly calls him "Dad" when calling on Malcolm to act like a normal father for once and come up with a solution to her bloodlust that doesn't involve killing. Unfortunately Malcolm has no such solution, thereby failing another chance to repair his relations with Thea.
• You Have Failed Me: Darhk demonstrates his fondness for this trope, performing it twice.