In Review: Arrow – Emerald Archer

Synopsis: As a camera crew follows Oliver and team around to talk about their past as vigilantes and what the Green Arrow means to Star City, Oliver must also deal with William’s return from boarding school as well as a new threat to the city.

Review: This week marks the 150th episode of Arrow and to help celebrate. We get an episode that his part documentary and part regular episode.

The Story

In order to show Star City that he is looking to do everything out in the open. Oliver has allowed a documentary to be made about his former life as a vigilante, but when Emiko is taken by a mysterious masked villain, which Curtis nicknames Crimea. Things get complicated.

Adding to the complexity is the fact that Ollies son William has returned home from boarding school and he’s not a happy camper.

The Acting

We get a solid voice-over performance this week from Kelsey Grammer who acts as narrator for the documentary footage.

We also get some very nice cameos from various characters from the past of the show. These include a welcome return for Paul Blackthorne as Quentin Lance, Willa Holland as Thea Queen, Bex Taylor-Klaus as Sin, and Caity Lotz as Sara Lance aka The White Canary.

Overall

This is a fun episode, which fulfills the purpose of allowing Team Arrow to come together again and even gets the new Star City Mayor to give her backing by pretty much deputizing Ollie’s entire team.

The documentary idea worked well, but there was a part of me that wanted to watch the whole documentary about Green Arrow as a separate thing from the episode.

One of the few niggles I had was the teenage drama of William returning home with a major case of the sulks. While it is understandable for Ollies son to be more than a little upset. I felt it kind of undermined this episode and may have worked better as the meat around the bones of another story.

Overall. This celebrates Arrow in style and the cameo appearances from former regular characters really made a difference.