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Episode 1.11
Writer: Gabrielle Stanton
Director: Nick Copus

THE ONE WHERE: Oliver comes into conflict with Dig when he confronts a crooked security team targeting armoured trucks – and remembers betrayal during his island exile. Thea suspects her mother of infidelity and ends up arrested after taking drugs on her 18 ^th birthday. Yes, all human life is here, folks.

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.