Arrow Season 5 Episode 1 Review: “Legacy”

For the past few months, the creative team behind The CW’s Arrow has been promising a back-to-basics approach to the show’s fifth season. After leaning so heavily on the magical aspects of the DC TV Universe in Season 4, the show’s writers wanted to get back to the more gritty and grounded (well, grounded for a superhero show anyway) drama that made the early seasons of the series so captivating. Producers, along with Arrow star Stephen Amell, told fans to look forward to a darker, more action-packed Season 5, one that would move away from the mystical elements of the past two seasons and return to the show’s roots. So did the Arrow creative team keep their promise? Did we get a return to the Arrow of old in tonight’s Season 5 premiere, “Legacy”? Both yes and no.

There’s a lot to love about “Legacy,” from the new challenges facing our favorite characters to the well-utilized moments of humor (some of which Oliver provides!) to the flashbacks, which actually tie back into the main story in the present in a thematically satisfying way for the first time in a long time. However, what deserves the most praise from the Season 5 premiere is the action. Every action sequence throughout “Legacy” is pretty damn terrific, and they’re all wonderfully helmed by stunt coordinator-turned-director, James Bamford, who does some great work throughout this episode.

And perhaps the best part about the action is that it feels both old and new. Sure, there’s an energy and intensity to it that’s akin to what we would see from Arrow in Seasons 1 and 2, and it’s certainly difficult to discover brand new ways to have Oliver battle criminals in dark warehouses again and again, especially on a CW budget. However, Bamford and the rest of the show’s team are able to craft some truly memorable action moments throughout “Legacy,” none more so than Oliver soaring up into the air and following Tobias Church (The Walking Dead‘s Chad L. Coleman) to his helicopter as he attempts to get away. The CGI here isn’t seamless (again, CW budget), but it’s a bold and ambitious end to a pretty tremendous fight sequence, as Oliver and Lance’s team of “good cops” take down Church’s men and rescue Star City’s most important politicians.

As exciting and entrancing as the action in “Legacy” is, though, it’s not the only part of the premiere that succeeds. The Arrow writers and Stephen Amell do a fantastic job at capturing just how broken and hopeless Oliver remains after the events of Season 4. Following Laurel’s death and the disintegration of Team Arrow, Oliver is a lost soul trying to atone for his mistakes. He believes the only way that he can truly keep Laurel’s legacy alive is not by honoring her wish of adding a new Canary to the team (so that, in some way, she’ll always be out there fighting with him) but by ensuring that no other person gets harmed while attempting to save the city. Oliver reverts back to his Season 1 mentality of going into the fight alone and taking no prisoners, even going as far as killing several of Church’s men.

Thea’s not wrong when she tells Oliver that “putting killing on the table is a huge step backwards” for him, and while the kill/don’t kill debate has been had way too many times before on Arrow, this time feels different because Oliver actually seems different. He no longer envisions himself as a hero anymore, or even as a vigilante; instead, Oliver Queen only sees himself as a force of nature, a one-man wrecking machine whose only goal is to eliminate evil at any cost. To reference the Russian proverb that Oliver and Anatoly discuss, killing again is how Oliver believes he can keep swimming; being able to permanently vanquish the evil on the streets of Star City is the only way that he can move forward in his life, so he has to fall back into his old mindset, his old persona, to move on from the loss he has suffered.

It remains to be seen if this new/old version of Oliver will stick around Arrow for too long. By the end of the premiere, he agrees to take on and train a new team of vigilantes, but that’s more due to necessity (he can’t realistically fight all these criminals on his own–there’s just too many of them) than any type of desire or longing to create new connections and make new friends. Will this more brutal and vicious Oliver be able to lead a team again, or will his current emotional state prevent him from doing so? Will this new group of vigilantes be successful, or will they fail to accomplish what the previous team did before?

We’ll have to wait and see, but it looks like Oliver will definitely need some type of help fighting crime on the streets of Star City in Season 5, especially when he encounters this year’s big bad, Prometheus, who makes quite the entrance in the episode’s final scene. Prometheus may not be the Green Arrow, but judging from what he does to one of Lance’s “good cops” before killing him, it certainly looks like this villain could go toe-to-toe with the Emerald Archer and I, for one, can’t wait to see it happen.

Other thoughts:

• I spent most of my review discussing Oliver’s current state, so let’s check in on where the rest of the characters are at the start of Season 5. Thea is enjoying her new “normal” life, which is something she didn’t believe she could have after being on Team Arrow, and now that she has it, she won’t give it up, especially not if Oliver has gone back to killing (some terrific acting from Willa Holland through this episode, especially during Thea’s big scenes with Lance and Oliver). Also seemingly enjoying her new life is Felicity, who has a new boyfriend in the form of Detective Billy Malone, and appears to be quite content in remaining Oliver’s moral soundboard, even if they aren’t romantically involved anymore. Meanwhile, Dig looks to be doing okay (for now, anyway) while fighting overseas, and Lance has fallen off the wagon and broken up with Donna but shows some promising signs by episode’s end that he’s going to get his life back together.
• Really love that Laurel’s final words to Oliver were about keeping the spirit of the Black Canary alive. Felt very fitting for the character that she had evolved into by Season 4 and worked well with the overall theme of this episode being people’s legacies.
• Even though I enjoyed the flashbacks in this episode more than any of the ones we got in Season 4, they still feel like such an unnecessary part of the show. I’m very interested to see what Arrow will be like in Season 6 when it doesn’t have to adhere by the flashback structure anymore, but hey, at least for this final season of them we get some cool stuff with the Bratva and the return of Anatoly.
• I’m very curious to see how Oliver will continue to juggle his responsibilities as mayor and Green Arrow. There’s a lot of good material to mine there, and I hope the writers really dig into it as the season continues.
• This episode, as all Arrow episodes do, needed more John Diggle, but I’m happy that we at least got to see David Ramsey on screen, even if it was just for a Skype call.
• “I didn’t vote you for you.” “That’s okay. I ran unopposed.” More lines like this from Oliver, please.
• “How did you ditch your security detail?” “I used to ditch John Diggle.”

What did everyone else think about “Legacy,” and what do you hope to see from Arrow in Season 5? Comment below and let me know. 

[Photo credit: Bettina Strauss/The CW]