ARROW 6.14 Review “Collision Course”
This post contains spoilers for Arrow.
Check out our previous review here.
If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like if Arrow did its own storylines, but actually did them well, season six is for you! It’s not great for a show to rehash old plot points so soon, but season six continues to manage to work inexplicably. We’ve seen the team fractured before, but this time everyone has a point and by and large it’s a whole new set of mistakes leading to it. Oliver’s failed his friends and his city countless times, but never quite to the scale that he’s failing them now. At the same time, he’s learning and adapting, which is so much more than can be said for the old Oliver Queen.
“Collision Course” is exactly what it sounds like. OTA vs NTA has basically been the Irresistible force paradox, with said force being several rookie heroes who can’t reconcile that they mostly suck at their jobs. Black Canary still wants to murder Black Siren, despite the spoken misgivings of her team, while Oliver needs Earth 2 Laurel alive to get the money she liberated from Cayden James’ bank account (and, by proxy, Star City). Kudos to mayor Oliver Queen for acknowledging that he’s the last one to have any right to lecture someone about murder, but he’s still not going to get out of Dinah’s way.
That feud covers the story for the whole episode, but the two teams clashing creates some great dynamics between the cast. There’s a Civil War vibe to the whole thing, with the exception of one pairing: Lance and Black Siren. Quentin Lance making seemingly foolish decisions for his daughters fits in with the rest of the story in the sense that it’s not new to his character at all, but just like the rest of these tropes we’ve seen before, there’s a little something new this time. Lance isn’t pushing, he’s just offering to be there for his daughter. He’s probably wrong to trust her, and she’s definitely not Earth 1 Laurel, but at least he’s not being a pushy jerk.
The rest of “Collision Course” is a lot of yelling and a lot of friends punching other friends. Oh, and Rene shot Felicity. No big. Thankfully Oliver didn’t see that part go down, because he bashes Rene up hard enough to open up his old gunshot wound without knowing that he shot his wife. There probably wouldn’t have been an ICU step otherwise. While Black Canary is about to go on a murder spree, and Rene is picking fights left and right, Curtis is sitting on a “moral high ground” that includes him shorting out Dig’s chip to track where they are. He sticks with this “I’m the good guy here” mentality throughout the end of the episode, so that moves us to every single party being unable to acknowledge that they messed up and need to move on.
In the kerfuffle, Team Arrow’s status goes from bad to worse. Rene’s in the hospital (which is now going to shut down with the rest of the city’s resources due to them being unable to recover the money), and OTA and NTA have gone from collaboration buddies to war. Everyone blames everyone else for the failure, and Black Siren is in the wind with the seventy million dollars that could save Star City. The trouble with all of this blame, confusion, and hurt, is that it falls to the leader to ensure that the team knows how to function. Oliver’s right about a lot of things, but it will still fall on him to find a way to get this two sets of teams to work together.
There's no progression of the Diaz arc in "Collision Course", but we'll see that progress in next week's episode, along with the return of Roy Harper and a suited-up Speedy. Diaz has made a visit to Blüdhaven (or pulled Roy into Star City) and their chat doesn't seem to be going in Roy's favor. Perhaps we'll see the team give up on NTA for a touch longer now that they'll have Red Arrow back in play.
In the meantime, you know what to do if you had thoughts on the episode!
