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Episode 1.11
Writer: Gabrielle Stanton
Director: Nick Copus

THE VERDICT: This one’s all about trust issues. For once the island flashbacks fit thematically with the main storyline – and the end-of-episode revelation that Yao Fei appears to be in league with Eddie Fryers certainly makes for an effective rug-pull. There’s an equally striking moment when Dig turns up to sabotage Oliver’s little tete-a-tete with Ted Gaynor (a surprisingly low-key turn by Stargate and Farscape fave Ben Browder). It’s moments like these that let you persevere through such poor material as Tommy, Malcolm and Laurel’s dinner conversation, a spectacularly awkward collision of stilted dialogue and laughably overripe emotion (“And when did she teach you that?” “When she was lying dead in the street with a bullet in her head!”). Director Nick Copus lifts this episode with a couple of flourishes that bring an authentically comic book sense of kinetics to the show: the camera follows a rocketing cannister as it hurtles into a truck's windscreen while one of Oliver’s expertly-judged arrows knocks off a robber’s mask in a moment that genuinely feels like a frame of four-colour action on the page.

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TRIVIA: Blackhawk Squad Protection Group is a tip of the flying cap to DC icons the Blackhawk squadron. Created in 1941, the team were classically depicted as international air aces.

DID YOU SPOT: Dig makes a disparaging reference to Oliver’s subterranean lair as an “Arrow Cave”. Green Arrow did indeed possess an Arrow Cave in Golden Age comic book lore, a period when the character shamelessly xeroxed the crime-fighting trappings of DC’s rather more successful Batman.

DID YOU SPOT 2: Thea takes a drug named Vertigo, a nod to DC’s Vertigo imprint, the line of horror/fantasy focused titles for mature readers founded in 1993.

BEST LINE:
Oliver: “I’m going to have a pointed conversation with Mr Gaynor tonight.”

Read all our Arrow reviews.

Arrow airs in the UK on Sky1

Nick Setchfield is the Editor-at-Large for SFX Magazine, writing features, reviews, interviews, and more for the monthly issues. However, he is also a freelance journalist and author with Titan Books. His original novels are called The War in the Dark, and The Spider Dance. He's also written a book on James Bond called Mission Statements.