Check out Josh’s recap of last week’s episode of Arrow, titled Haunted, where Oliver finally figures out Sara has been brought back, and that Oliver has an old friend in John Constantine. Also check out our thoughts on the episode!
Don’t need the Arrow episode recap for Haunted? Click here to jump directly to Violet’s thoughts on the episode!
To see Josh’s thoughts on this week’s Arrow episode, Haunted, click here to get directly there!
Episode Recap of Arrow, Season 4 Episode 5: Haunted
Arrow opens with a waitress being attacked by two men. She is saved, and her hero is Sara. Sara kills the two men, but then turns to hurt the waitress. The police show up though, and Sara flees. The cops talk to the waitress about this person, and Laurel shows up. Lance talks to Laurel and he realizes that this person must be Sara.
Moving to Thea, she introduces Alex Davis, a political strategist that will be assisting with Oliver’s mayor run. His first piece of advice is for Oliver to distance his relationship with Laurel. Despite Thea bringing this man in, Thea doesn’t agree with this decision. Felicity contacts the two, letting them know about a blond woman who is causing trouble. Laurel shows up to try to take her down, but Sara breaks free. Oliver shows up and discovers Sara is the culprit that has been causing trouble around the city.
Oliver then has some choice words for Laurel and Thea, realizing that they weren’t at a spa.
Felicity asks her new friend, Curtis, for some help with the recording from Ray Palmer. Felicity thinks there is more to the recording, and Curtis gets to work on it.
With Darhk, Lance is requested to do a favor–plugging a device into a secured server farm.
Lance comes to Oliver about Sara, and the device Darhk gave him. It looks like it is a device to delete information on the server. Lance then works with Diggle to complete his mission. They head out to perform their mission at the server farm, and the device is deleting information about people in the system. Diggle keeps look out, but eventually security shows up. To fool the guards, Lance whacks Diggle in the head, pretending to capture the “intruder.” While the files were being deleted, Diggle saw information about his brother. Diggle works to get that information so he can see what is going on.
Lance returns the device to Darhk, and asks about Diggle’s brother. Andrew Diggle apparently was running some drug ring, and Darhk had him assassinated to eliminate competition. Lance returns to Diggle, and tells him about what happened.
While talking with Felicity, Oliver and she come to the conclusion that Sara is looking for Thea, since Thea is the one who killed her. Oliver tries to warn Thea, but Thea ignores the call. Then Sara breaks in. Thea and Sara fight, but Thea is forced to flee. She heads down a staircase, and manages to lose Sara.
When Thea reconvenes with Oliver, and the team, the best solution they come up with to find Sara is to use Thea as bait after Thea is attacked in the hospital again. They use Thea’s old club as the place, and after a bit of a scuffle, Sara is captured. Then they realize that Sara is without her soul. Oliver has decided the best solution is to contact an old friend–John Constantine.
John Constantine begins a ritual, to restore Sara’s soul. The ritual takes people to a spirit realm, and only two people can go with John. The two are Oliver and Laurel. They head to the realm, and after some fighting and wandering around, they find Sara trapped in the Lazarus Pit. Upon freeing her, the realm ends, and the three end up back in reality. Sara wakes up, and the ritual seemed to have worked. Afterwards, John tells Oliver to watch out for Darhk.
Back at his campaign office, Oliver makes the decision to not turn his back on Laurel, despite his campaign manager’s request. Meanwhile, Felicity learns that Ray is still alive, but in trouble from a hidden message in the recording.
In the flashbacks, our friendly, annoying guard, Conklin, brings Oliver’s communication device to the boss, and accuses Oliver of being a mole. The boss doesn’t seem to want to deal with this. He has to deal with another man, who turns out to be John Constantine.
Apparently, John is looking for an artifact, and this boss man wants Oliver to retrieve whatever it is. But John gets free from his cuffs, and takes Oliver hostage. John directs Oliver to drive to the location on the map.
Upon arriving to the place, John leads Oliver into a cave which has an artifact, Indiana Jones-style, sitting on a pedestal. John grabs the artifact, and Oliver tackles John, saving him from a booby trap that would have killed him.
Afterwards, John tells Oliver than they should leave the island together, but Oliver wants to help the slaves. John gives Oliver the top of the artifact which is not the important part of it. Then John gives Oliver a tattoo using the artifact, which will be a spell, that apparently Oliver will know how and when to use it….
Josh’s Thoughts: Arrow, Season 4 Episode 5: Haunted
So we see Constantine this episode, which was interesting given that his own show was seemingly cancelled. I was not a big fan of his show, but this episode, I thought he worked pretty well as a side character. I wouldn’t mind seeing him show up in future episodes dealing with magic, and exorcisms and such, but I don’t want it to become too prevalent in the show, making it more supernatural than grounded in reality. It is a fine line to walk, and I hope the showrunners walk it well.
I wonder how long Sara will be sticking around now that her soul is back, and I wonder if she is actually okay now, or if there is still some recovery she will have to go through. We know she will be heading to a new show eventually, so I don’t think we will be seeing her around for that long.
As for Ray, it looks like Darhk has him in a little jar, since he seemingly has shrunk to the size of Ant-Man, but doesn’t seem to have the strength to escape. The next episode looks to be dealing with figuring out how to save him.
One disappointing thing with Arrow lately is the feeling that they are focusing on expanding their shows rather than telling a good story. I am all for expanding the shows, but they can’t do it at the expense of their current shows. Hopefully this feeling goes away once the storylines of Ray and Sara are finished up, and we move forward with taking on Damien Darhk a little more.
Violet’s Thoughts on Season 4 Episode 5 of Arrow: Haunted
So that was pretty cool to see Matt Ryan back in action as John Constantine again, after Constantine had been canceled. Speaking of which, it is a bit sad that Constantine was canceled, considering that the number of viewers it had on NBC are higher than Arrow‘s number of viewers have been this season. Is this any indication that CW might pick up Constantine at some point as yet another spinoff? Maybe, maybe not. Right now, the Arrow and The Flash writers have their hands full with trying to set up the first spinoff, Legends of Tomorrow. Of course, this is why we’ve had this whole storyline of reviving Sara with the Lazarus Pit, and now using Constantine to restore her soul, so that she can go on to join the cast of Legends of Tomorrow. Knowing where the story was going from the outset, since we already knew that Sara would be a member of the Legends, kind of took the guesswork and suspense out of the past few episodes.
In any case, I thought it was kind of weird that when Oliver and Laurel went into the vision with Constantine, that Sara was in the Lazarus Pit. It seemed like in rescuing her from the pit, they were rescuing her soul. But why was her soul even in the pit? She had already died a long time ago, so one would think that her soul went elsewhere, as she had nothing to do with the Lazarus Pit at the point of her death. Then when her body went into the Lazarus Pit, something else came out as a soulless Sara. So I disagreed with how that part played out. This would make more sense in regards to Thea, who was still alive when she was placed into the Lazarus Pit. Maybe part of her soul was left behind, claimed by the pit, so it would follow that if they went into a vision, they could rescue that part of her from the pit. Right now, no one seems to be concerned with Thea and curing her bloodlust. I suppose Sara was a higher priority, but they need to address this at some point down the road.
But other than that, there were two big reveals this episode. One was what happened to Diggle’s brother, and the other was that Ray is still alive. Although, the latter is not really a big reveal, as once again, we already know that he’s part of the cast of Legends of Tomorrow. So I guess the next step is figuring out how to save Ray, so he can go join the other show! Apparently, Damien Darhk has a shrunken Ray trapped under a glass jar? How’d that happen?? I am curious to find out…
Scenes from Arrow, Season 4 Episode 6: Lost Souls
Here are scenes from the next Arrow episode, titled Lost Souls:
