As a result of last week’s events, Rene gives up Oliver’s identity to Tobias Church within the 20 hour period he’d been tortured. After being rescued, he’s paired with Diggle for therapeutic means and digging into the recesses of his traumatic memory to figure out what Church’s plans are, in tandem with giving Diggle his classic lecture mode to settle into.
Rene’s dishonorable discharge is shared soon after, and it’s revealed there are more similarities between him and Diggle than most would expect, aside from the fact that Rene is the most loose canon character in the entire DCTV universe.
In our Plot A of the episode, Oliver needed to fake his own death to lure Church and cronies out of the woodwork now that his cover is blown. To accomplish this, an old friend of Diggle, and one who’d previously encountered Oliver in Russia, was the Human Target, Christopher Chance. Other than providing a ratings stunt with a crane shot over Stephen Amell bleeding on the street, the character also exposes his process of learning about the target he is impersonating, and reveals to Oliver that Felicity was in fact seeing the detective that had been hired recently into the Anti Crime Unit for Star City. This eventually gets spun into Oliver and Felicity’s first stage of “Olicity” moments of the season considering that, as mentioned in previous reviews, they’ve behaved in a very platonic way in the lair so far this season. So far their shred of affection for each other shines through better than their entire engagement period last year, but whether Oliver’s words about being happy for her are sincere or strictly scripted has yet to be revealed. For now we’ll assume he’s being honest as a foil to Felicity being the secret keeper for the time being with her current relationship.
Plot C is very loosely stapled into the episode as Susan the reporter makes a return and very adamantly looking for more scoops on a mayor she finds both attractive and generally an under qualified idiot. The weird romantic tension that surely won’t end well begins with this plotline in which Oliver is attempting to get a corrupt congressman or two to convert their votes towards benefiting the growth of the low income housing, but that political aspect of the hour, much like Oliver’s own attention towards it, serves no purpose other than to get the right people in the room together for progressing the plot. However, despite promising to take a reprieve from shooting bad PR in Oliver’s direction, she’s given a quick tab on the shoulder about his time in Russia and working with the Bratva. Oi vey, journalists are sneaky.
Human Target serves more of a purpose in the overall Season 5 story however, when a bodacious action sequence leads to the arrest of Tobias Church, and as we expected he was, as horror fans call it, the Harbinger, when he warns Oliver of his impending doom and reveals the name of this dark doppelganger, Prometheus, the identity of whom is still being kept secret. My money’s on Malcolm Merlyn because reasons. Not actually though, I’m too poor to bet real money on John Barrowman.
Rating 7/10
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