One of the many things Arrow does right is a good standalone episode. And that's just what we got tonight with "The Secret Origin of Felicity Smoak." As the title strongly implies, much of the focus of tonight's Arrow installment fell on Emily Bett Rickards' brainy character, Felicity, but the final moments delivered a shocking twist that had very little to do with the computer genius.
Spoilers ahead if you haven't watched Arrow Season 3, Episode 5 ("The Secret Origin of Felicity Smoak")!
As mentioned, tonight's episode ended with a pretty big twist. After the main conflict involving a computer hacker from Felicity's past was wrapped up, the episode caught up on a few of the other characters, including Roy, who was having a pretty intense nightmare, which featured Sara on the rooftop the night she died. We see her say "What're you doing here," and then the arrows come flying. The camera turns to Roy, who's throwing the arrows at Sara. Just as he begins to charge her, he wakes up.
The implication seems to be that Roy was the unseen person up on that roof during the season premiere, and that he killed Sara. Or he thinks he did. But that leaves us with quite a few questions, the most obvious one being, did he do it? If he did, it seems like he didn't remember it until the nightmare. Unless he's been dreaming about the ordeal since it happened, but i can't imagine that's the case. Assuming he didn't knowingly do it, that leaves us to wonder if he killed Sara and then somehow has no memory of it. Or else someone is making him think he did it. Of those two options, hopefully it's the latter. But who knows?
This seems set up to be an interesting arc, especially if Roy thinks he killed Sara. When we talked to Colton Haynes back at Comic-Con this summer, he spoke very vaguely about trust between Roy and Oliver's team. He implied that Roy might not be so trusting of Oliver and his team, and that they might not want to trust him. We haven't seen much of Roy this season, but tonight's ending strongly implies that that's about to change.
Elsewhere in Starling...
As if we didn't have enough reason to love Felicity, her mother entered the picture tonight, filling out the mental picture Felicity once gave us when she mentioned that Donna Smoak (Charlotte Ross) is a cocktail waitress. As we learned when a blast from Felicity's goth-dressing hacker past showed up and put Felicity and her mother at gunpoint (after wreaking hacker-havoc on Starling for a bit), Felicity and her mother may not be very much alike -- apart from being beautiful, obvs -- but Felicity did inherit her mother's toughness. And we got to see her go from being a hacktivist to a hero, which involved exchanging dark lipstick and a nose-ring for a blonde ponytail.
For a standalone episode, "The Secret Origin of Felicity" did a fantastic job of adding a bit more to Felicity as a character. The dynamic between Felicity and her mother is great, and there were some fantastic emotional moments scattered throughout tonight's episode. Hopefully Donna will be back.
Meanwhile, Laurel finally fessed up to her instructor, Ted, that she's out for blood over her sister's death. It looks like this reveal has motivated Ted to train her -- for herself though, not for vengeance.
As for the Queens, Oliver and Thea's relationship took a step in the right direction, but not until after Oliver learned that Thea was spending her father's money. They got past that though, and Thea invited Oliver to move into her massive apartment with the giant TV. Cut to Malcolm Merlyn watching them through the window from another building, creeper-style. Something tells me he won't like it if Thea and her brother get too bondy.
