Warning: spoilers ahead for the fourth and fifth episodes of Season 4 of Arrow ahead.
Arrow’s fourth Season 4 episode – entitled “Beyond Redemption” – saw more than one character who may be past the point of no return, but the most obvious qualifier is Sara Lance. She spent the majority of the episode chained to a post in Laurel’s basement, snapping and grunting and being almost certainly very uncomfortable in the leather corset that she’d died in a year ago. Without her soul, and being impervious to Laurel’s dubious attempts to cure her via a pictographic trip down memory lane, Sara was very nearly put down by her father. Fortunately for any other tenants in Laurel’s building, Sara managed to escape her captivity and go…somewhere.
Poor Sara does not deserve the title of “beyond redemption.” She didn’t exactly need to be redeemed back when she was moldering peacefully away in her pine box. The Sara who died after dishing out love advice to Oliver and hugging her sister is not the same Sara who came out of the Lazarus Pit. Contrary to what Laurel seems to believe, a few days chained to a post with family photos to look at are not going to be enough to bring Sara back to who she was. With the thing that is now Sara wild and on the loose, Team Arrow and Co. will need more than a scrapbook to fix the situation.
Fortunately, Oliver apparently managed to bring a rolodex back from his five years in hell with some handy contact information for just this situation. Exorcist and demon hunter extraordinaire John Constantine will be making an appearance in Episode 5, "Haunted," to do what he can with the Sara situation. Hopefully, he’ll also take the time to yell at the guilty parties for casual use of a Lazarus Pit. Resurrection always comes at a price; considering none of the major characters are likely to die in the fifth episode, it’s likely that Sara will ultimately be footing the bill.
"Haunted" should hopefully at least rehabilitate Sara enough that she will not try to choke her sister to death as her first course of action in a given situation. Even pushing trying to strangle Laurel back to second or third course of action would technically be an improvement. After all, Sara does have somewhere that she needs to be in 2016.
As a key member of the new time-traveling team on the upcoming spinoff Legends of Tomorrow, Sara will hardly be able to contribute as White Canary if she’s still a snarling shade of her former self. We’ll have to wait and see what Constantine can do for Sara next week and whether or not the woman in white who will be joining the crew on Legends will ever have the same light in her that pre-Pit Sara had even at her darkest days. If, however, Sara’s soul is so irreparably scarred by her death and dip in the Pit that she is more monster than woman even after a helping hand from Constantine, I’d say that she’s entitled to choke a few of the people who got her into this mess.
Perhaps starting with Laurel.
