Furious that Oliver's trial ended with him walking free, Diaz decides to go for the brutal approach; murder Oliver and anyone he cares about. Luckily Anatoly is back on Oliver's side.
- All for Nothing: At the end of the episode, Team Arrow is not one step closer to defeating Diaz.
- All Your Base Are Belong to Us: Something that recurs over the course of the episode - Diaz and his men attack Oliver and his associates at their homes and their bases of operation.
- Back-to-Back Badasses: Lyla and John fight off Diaz's men in this manner.
- The Bus Came Back: Agent Watson, whom Oliver recruits to help stop Diaz.
- Deal with the Devil: Oliver is forced to make one with Agent Watson to stop Diaz. She won't help unless he confesses to being the Green Arrow to her. The second condition is unrevealed (though it's implied that when all is said and done Oliver will go to prison).
- Don't Create a Martyr: Subverted, Diaz is no longer following this line of thinking as he's so pissed at being beaten he loses all sense of pragmatism.
- Eviler than Thou: After killing Cassamento, Diaz proceeds to take over the Quadrant completely, killing Ibanescu and forcing Broderick to submit to him.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: Oliver gets a text from Anatoly seconds before Diaz's men attack his apartment.
- Godzilla Threshold: With nothing left to lose, Oliver is forced to go to Agent Watson to help.
- Heel–Face Turn: Anatoly warns Oliver and his friends about the attacks on them and goes on to act as The Mole for them.
- Hollywood Hacking: The SCPD computer analyst managed to trace a copied hard drive...which is pretty much impossible unless Felicity were to be such a greenhorn that she'd allow drive auto-executables (typically found on program CDs) to be run. (in the real world, this is easily disabled in any major OS)
- Also, apparently interrupting the decryption process halfway triggered a self-destruct in the data. This is also impossible, as in the real world it's simply inert files sitting on a hard drive.
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: As always, the penultimate episode of the season is named after a Bruce Springsteen song.
- Jerkass: Agent Watson won't help Oliver unless he confesses to being the Green Arrow to her.
- Klingon Promotion: Diaz kills two other leaders of the Quadrant, effectively giving him total control of the enterprise.
- Love Is a Weakness: Diaz calls love the real king-killer.
- Manipulative Bastard: Anatoly succeeds in convincing Diaz that Lydia Cassamento was the one to leak out his plans to Team Arrow, which later leads to him killing her.
- The Mole: Anatoly now acts as this for Team Arrow, telling them about Diaz's moves and feeding the latter false information.
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Diaz delivers one to Curtis, ending with a knife stuck in his stomach. If he hadn't been forced to flee, he could've easily killed him.
- No Kill like Overkill: After the failed trial, Diaz has dropped all subtleties and goes after Oliver and his friends with the full force of his criminal organization and the corrupt cops.
- Plot Hole: Lyla comments that ARGUS doesn't have any authority to arrest Diaz. Yet several of Star City's criminals in the past like Deadshot, Bronze Tiger, Shrapnel, Cupid and Prometheus all ended up in ARGUS custody.
- Putting the Band Back Together: With Diaz on the warpath and having settled their differences, New Team Arrow and Original Team Arrow team up again to finally end Diaz.Curtis: Can I say it for old time's sake? Time to suit up!
- Revenge by Proxy: Diaz's plan involves killing everybody Oliver loves.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Diaz's response to Oliver's trial not going the way he wanted is to declare all out war on Oliver and his comrades. The episode begins with his men targeting the vigilantes one by one.
- Swapped Roles: Dinah warns Curtis not to act rashly over his boyfriend being attacked, like she reacted to Vincent being killed.
- Taking the Bullet: Curtis' boyfriend Nick takes one for him during the attack on them. Fortunately, he survives.
- Trash the Set: Two for one; Diaz's men torch Team Arrow's bunker, and then, when Dinah, Curtis and Rene's hideout comes under attack, Oliver triggers its self-destruct mechanism.
- Villainous Breakdown: Diaz spends the whole episode having one as he loses all sense of pragmatism and starts all out war in Star City trying to kill Team Arrow.
