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Arrow Ep. 3.15 “Nanda Parbat” benefits from the presence of truth

Arrow Ep. 3.15 “Nanda Parbat” benefits from the presence of truth

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Arrow Season 3, Episode 15 “Nanda Parbat”
Written by Wendy Mericle (story), Erik Oleson (teleplay), and Ben Sokolowski (story & teleplay)
Directed by Gregory Smith
Airs Wednesdays at 8pm ET on The CW

Stepping back and viewing “Nanda Parbat” as a whole is kind of a bad idea. On a broad scale, Arrow is a bit of a hot mess right now, juggling multiple story lines and integrating wildly different character arcs with each other, all to varying degrees of success – and in some cases, coherency. A lot of what’s going on this season still isn’t clear; and the decisions made in the last fifteen minutes of this episode by the writers only complicate these matters further, in not-so-fun ways. Despite that, there’s one thing “Nanda Parbat” has going for it that too many episodes this season have lacked: truth, something many characters have avoided speaking up until this point.

Again, the plot mechanics of “Nanda Parbat” are a mess; one scene with Felicity and Ray, who seem to have walked into a completely different show, display that pretty brazenly, a disconnect that other stories are equally suffering from (Ray has a fancy red car all of a sudden, for one; his character development into sidekick is just really being delivered as a series of bullet points at this point). Laurel’s trying to avenge a death, Oliver’s continuing to defend Merlyn for reasons a lot of explaining (A LOT of explaining) can’t quite justify, and Diggle’s wife is cool with him going on a suicide mission; on a larger scale, there is just a lot of stuff on Arrow that doesn’t quite make sense in the moment, and works only on the hope that this is all leading to some interesting end- which season two certainly showed the show can do. There are plenty of moments in early-to-mid season two of Arrow that are still trying to find their rhythm – but the longer and longer some of these sillier, less important stories take up screen time, it begins to convolute the larger picture, which comes into play heavily in the last ten minutes when all of a sudden, the guy murdering Arrow just a month ago offers him his job as head of the League.

Huh?

Seriously: there’s a reason that last paragraph felt so over-stuffed and complicated; that’s what “Nanda Parbat” feels like, to the point where every character has to open a conversation explaining exactly what their emotions are, because it’s become pretty hard to keep track of what’s actually happening here. Simply put, there’s no reason Oliver should still be going to bat for Merlyn –  and the animosity it causes between him and the rest of Team Arrow (which currently consists of Parkour Boy, Laurel the Punching Bag, and 50% less Felicity and Diggle) clouds the fact they wouldn’t let Oliver just leave to return and fight the man who dismissively stabbed him and kicked him off a fucking mountain not a half dozen episodes earlier (which he survived, and returned to Starling City to get yelled at by everyone on the team for being gone; don’t think I haven’t forgotten the welcome wagon of shit Oliver returned to last month). Throw on top some flashbacks that still aren’t giving us any context to what’s happening in the present – and what do we have so far for season three?

The answer is simple: a lot of big, show-y moments (Ray Palmer the superhero! Sara gets murdered! Laurel becomes hero! Oliver gets murdered, kind of!) that haven’t added up to anything, a complaint that can easily be rectified in the nine remaining episodes, but remains a major problem nonetheless. Arrow has bungled some stories this season, be it the effectively useless Wildcat, the narrative whiplash (and at times, carbon copy repetition) between Oliver and Ray, Felicity’s horrible flashbacks, or how Sara was murdered; the point is, there haven’t been a ton of promising signs that this season is building towards something promising, especially lacking the momentum the story of Deathstroke brought to Arrow’s second season (a story line that sprung from a laughably ridiculous place itself, lest we forget).

There is one saving grace to all of this: as Arrow chugs through this difficult, convoluted mid-season stretch, characters are finally beginning to tell the truth. Felicity doesn’t hold back in her interactions with either Ray or Oliver (I’d love to write a think piece about Felicity losing all agency as a character since she’s become a romantic sidepiece for heroes in the last year, but I’ll save that for someone with more time – let me just say I’m not a fan), and other characters like Thea and Laurel are finally facing (and speaking) truths we’ve been waiting for since the first season – and now that those personal arcs are finally beginning to kick into gear, it’s picking up some of the slack where the show’s plot has failed to capture (OH MY GOD OLIVER IS GOING TO TAKE OVER THE LEA – oh wait, the show is still called Arrow).

At the end of the day, though, Arrow is a plot-driven show through and through – and so it’s a little worrisome that I’m enjoying the character work so much, and the dramatic thrust so little, because the latter is destined to win out in the final stretch of episodes. When it appears in “Nanda Parbat”, it turns an otherwise perfunctory episode into something more complex and dynamic, and reminds why Arrow can be such a rewarding plot-driven show, when everything is working in unison. Right now, Arrow just isn’t in that rhythm, and needs to do some major streamlining if it’s going to do so in time.

— Randy

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