Arrow S3x15 “Nandu Parbat”

WARNING! SPOILERS!

There was a lot of awesome stuff happening in this episode and it’s good to see that although there have been plenty of negative things to say about Arrow’s third season, there are still plenty of entertaining moments that it has going for it as well.

This week’s episode, Nanda Parbat, saw yet more truths admitted to one another, and it feels like all the lies that people have been telling to each other for the whole series have started to come apart through some way or another. We got plenty more revelations in this episode as well, and it was great to see that the writers delivered with a strong outing for Team Arrow. One of the strongest parts of this week was the fact that Thea killing Sara (whose death may not be 100% permanent given that Caity Lotz is confirmed to have a role in an upcoming CW DC show that will also feature the Atom, one half of Firestorm and Captain Cold), is now out in the open. Laurel’s reaction was unexpected but welcomed, and it’s clear that she didn’t hate Thea for it. Nyssa’s reaction however is another matter, and with Thea leaving out the fact that Malcolm brainwashed her to Nyssa (and handing her a sword to do so) left things on a very interesting cliffhanger indeed.

Thea herself had an excellent character arc in this episode as well, and it’s great to see that Arrow knows when its characters are stupid and annoying, and either kills them off, (DJ Ninja Assassin guy) or transforms them into people that are almost completely unrecognizable from what they were before. Thea is now 100% more developed and this episode did a great job of fleshing out her character as she turned on her father, betraying him to the League of Assassins. This was big, and really has the potential to kick-start the plot in multiple ways. Also, Laurel’s fight against Malcolm was, although brief and one-sided, nicely one as well, allowing for a nice build-up to the appearance of the League.

Whilst this episode may have lacked as much tension as episodes like The Climb, because, let’s face it, they’re not going to kill off Ollie this quickly and Malcolm will have more punishment to endure, the cliffhangers at the end were handled pretty well. Like the aforementioned Thea one, the Diggle/Ollie plot that saw them invade Nanda Parbet itself was tackled well, with some cool fight scenes against the League, even if (of course) it was ultimately a trap.

Once again, the Ray Palmer and Felicity plot threads in this episode felt like tonally, a completely different episode and it’s easy to see why that the ATOM is moving onto his own show in the future. Although Brandon Routh is great, his character always feels out of place in the overall scheme of things and his plot’s been moving along a lot slower than the rest have. Think about it. Ollie’s gone off to fight Ra’s Al Ghul, Sara’s become the Black Canary and Thea’s handed over Malcolm to the League and they’ve returned to the Island to face Slade all in the same amount of time that it took Ray to finally finish his ATOM suit. But despite my complaints, the wait however, seems to have been worth it, with the scene where he tried on the suit being handled pretty well.

So on the whole, there were lots of good things going on in this episode, whilst at the same time, it didn’t hit all the high notes. It certainly wasn’t a bad episode though, and it’ll be very interesting to see what happens given that Ra’s has now offered Ollie to become the new Head of the Demon (he can’t say yes, can he?). However, unfortunately, like with The Flash, there’s no new episodes for a while, with the next new episode coming on March 18, so we’ll have to wait until then to find out what happens next.