- Title: Green Arrow – Muse of Fire
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“Isn’t the man in the hood fighting to set things right? Why is your vendetta more valid that mine?”
Starling City gets a little crowded on the vigilante front when an armed assassin on a motorcycle kills a business man (John Cassini) in broad daylight while he was talking with Moira Queen (Susanna Thompson). Not-so-surprisingly the death of the businessman with mob connections to the Bertinelli crime family coincides with Oliver‘s (Stephen Amell) attraction to a young woman named Helena (Jessica De Gouw) harboring her own painful past and dark secret. That’s right boys and girls, it appears the Huntress has come to Starling City.
As Oliver sits down with Helena Bertinelli for dinner, her father (Jeffrey Nordling) meets with China White (Kelly Hu) who denies having any involvement in the attacks on his family’s business. Meanwhile, Detective Lance (Paul Blackthorne) investigates the latest murder hoping to catch the killer before the entire situation sparks an all-out mob war. When Oliver discovers that Helena is the killer systematically targeting her own family’s illegal enterprises on her own personal mission of vengeance he becomes conflicted as what to do next, but the situation is taken out of his hands when he and Helena are kidnapped by Bertinelli’s enforcer (Tahmoh Penikett) who plans on killing them both.
Ongoing stories include Thea’s (Willa Holland) continued disapproval of Ollie’s erratic behavior while spending some quality mother/daughter time following Moira’s accident and Merlyn‘s (Colin Donnell) new first date with Laurel (Katie Cassidy) doesn’t end quite as he wanted when he discovers his father (John Barrowman) has frozen all of his accounts to teach him a lesson. I’ve got to say I’m a little disappointed with the anticlimactic reveal of Barrowman’s character, but it does off him more opportunity to show up in other circumstances than only the mysterious business partner of the Queen family.
De Gouw is passable as Helena, but she does struggle with the more emotional and intimate dialogue in the episode’s final scene (which I’m beginning to suspect has more to do with the writers than the cast or guest-stars as this seems to be an ongoing problem) when the truth, as awkwardly as it is stated, comes out between the two. Although we don’t see the vigilante in full costume (we’ll have to wait until next week), the introduction of Helena’s vengeance killings should (hopefully) make Oliver take a hard look at the tactics and body count he has accumulated since returning to Starling City and beginning his crusade. Perhaps this, along with Diggle’s (David Ramsey) constant prodding, may begin to turn the vigilante into a real hero.
