Arrow: 1×06 “Legacies” (EPISODE REVIEW)

Episode six follows on the tracks of a family of professional bank robbers, and Oliver decides to fight crime instead of his father’s bad associates for once. He realizes that the family in question was led into their life of crime because of his father’s actions and feels personally accountable. He gives the father of the family a second chance at living honestly, but in the end he has to put him down. I don’t care for the way that Oliver reacted to him dying (with remorse), because Oliver has killed a lot of people.

Throughout the length of the episode we get small snippets of flashbacks to the island (kind of a reversed Lost) where he hallucinates about his father telling him that he’s weak. This comes as a stark contrast to how we view the newly emerged Oliver who’s masquerading as a vigilante in Starling. I really am sick of the whole flashback sequence stuff. I think ultimately this is less a flaw in the writing (although dead father coming back to make us stronger is a cliché that’s worn incredibly thin) and more of flaw in my own self getting bored at what I view unnecessary backstory.

Far too much of this episode is typical soap drama. And I’ll be the first to admit that I am easily entertained by that… But it isn’t what I want in a vigilante hero show. And if they continue to go down the soap opera route (which they’d be dumb not to), I do hope it interacts more with Oliver’s trials at hand. I am liking Thea a bit more now. So that’s one thing the episode did well.

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