Arrow was firing on all cylinders tonight. “We Fall” might have been the best episode of the season. After remaining in the planning stages of his big plan for weeks and weeks, Cayden James finally made his move against Oliver and the entire city, and it was bloody thrilling. Furthermore, having the two teams made the episode a lot more dynamic.
“We Fall” begins with Cayden James taking control of Star City’s electrical infrastructure and causing all kinds of mayhem. Unfortunately, police chief Frank Pike and a nameless councilman die from this initial attack. Once word spreads of the attacks, Team Arrow and The Outsiders (a.k.a. Rene, Curtis, and Dinah, who shot down that name for New Team Arrow, but I’m sticking with it) share intel and spring into action.
While Oliver heads to city hall, the Outsiders — who are very much enjoying being on a team they can trust — head out into the field because one of Curtis’ T-spheres surprisingly starts tracking Vigilante’s visor. This wasn’t an accident. Vigilante activated the T-sphere so he could stage a meeting with Curtis and warn him about Cayden’s plan to attack the subway system. It turns out Vigilante has been working as a double agent and wants to take Cayden down, too. Curtis decides not tell his new teammates about this little clandestine meeting, which is such an Oliver move, but he double checks the intel with Felicity and discover that it’s good. So, Curtis leads his new team out to stop two subway trains from colliding. Unfortunately, the system doesn’t respond, so it’s up to Dinah to use her sonic scream to hold one of the trains back — which is the latest clever application of the sonic scream. (Sith Laurel blowing a sonic kiss last week was also great.)
Speaking of which: Even though this episode is rather intense and the stakes are quite high, Arrow never gets bogged down by that, and it finds time to have fun. In addition to Dinah’s awesome save with her powers, there were other moments of levity in tonight’s episode. For example: Curtis, Rene, and Dinah bantering about whether or not to say “Suit up” before, you know, suiting up; Curtis suggesting they call themselves The Outsiders, a reference to a DC Comics group formed by Batman; and Cayden James showing up at city hall under the guise of Ben Gale, which is reference to the character Michael Emerson played on Lost (Ben, who first appeared under the alias Henry Gale). The writers are clearly having fun throwing in these little details, and that makes it fun for us. This kind of self-indulgence used to be rare for Arrow, but now it does it all the time, which is great. Even though season 6 has been somewhat uneven, it’s nice to see more evidence of Arrow‘s continued growth so late in the game…
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