Arrow Review: Invasion! (Season 5 Episode 8)
I watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” for the first time this past week. Blasphemy, I know. I truly enjoyed the movie, though, not just for its great acting and its emotional punch to the gut, but because of the message.
Home is home. And, as much as you might sometimes want to go back and change the past, you are where you are for a reason.
Arrow Season 5 Episode 8, “Invasion!” tries to take us on an emotional journey and reinforce this final conclusion. And I say tries, because it mostly fails.
But hey, we can at least give it this – it goes out swinging.
The cameos are everywhere, and they’re not just unimportant figures, no. Laurel is back, Robert and Moira are back, there’s a reference to Tommy alive and well and hey, there’s all those holograms when Oliver’s about to enter the portal.
But, as much as some moments truly hit the mark – Oliver saying goodbye to his parents, that Thea and Oliver conversation, some moments miss by so much that the end result is just …uneven and confusing.
Pretty much like this entire season of Arrow.
Even in a world where Oliver didn’t cheat on her with Sara, a world where their lives went the way they expected them to, Laurel is still not the thing Oliver would give everything up for. And that pretty much sucks – for Oliver and for Laurel.
Surprisingly, at this point, she’s not the thing Sara would give up everything for, either, which speaks to how much Sara has grown into her own skin in this season of Legends of Tomorrow. And kind of underscores how much Barry hasn’t, which is always a nice bonus.
Robert and Moira aren’t reason enough to stay either, not that we expected them to be. This was never really about the life our characters could have/should have had, after all. This was just a distraction.
Nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake.
And in that sense, the episode sort of works. It also sort of doesn’t.
Even when it falters, though, this is certainly the best Arrow has done this season, not just because of the nostalgia factor, but because of the real people inhabiting this hallucination.
The problem with the message, however, is that, for a moment that seems to last for far longer than they probably wanted it to; we sort of want this reality to be our reality. We want these people to stay.
Not because we necessarily love them, no. But because they’re, at least, closer to the people we used to love than what we’ve seen so far in Season 5.
Oliver is grumpy, but relatively good-hearted and a hero at heart. Felicity’s happy, kicking ass and taking names as both a career woman and a vigilante, and oh, yes, she still has a loving man at her side. Diggle is the Hood.
Not to mention Thea’s got her parents, Ray has his company (and a lovely fiancée) and Sara has her sister.
Sure, they’re not exactly the people we fell in love with, but this is season 5, aka the AU season, so, at this point, isn’t this better than the alternative?
In the end the episode that was supposed to be a love letter to fans is just a painful reminder of some of the things season five has been missing. And hey, if this is all meant to be a wake-up call before a much-needed return to continuity, then great, but even if it is – why did it take eight episodes?
And, if it’s not, then ….what’s even the point anymore?
Other things to note:
- I won’t say it wasn’t nice to see Robert and Moira Queen, it was. It just didn’t have the emotional significance it should have had.
- Hallucination!Felicity gets to wear her hair down. I wonder if that’s one of Oliver’s fetishes or something.
- Real!Felicity’s characterization was ALL OVER THE PLACE. Was she ever worried about Oliver? She certainly didn’t look it. All she looked was …giddy.
- Do I have to remind the writers AGAIN about the engagement? The first 4 seasons are on Netflix. It’s not that hard.
- The whole thing with Thea deciding to stay and everyone being fine with that was about as OOC as …well, the rest of season 5.
- While we’re at it, why are we pretending like Thea had any choice? They’re obviously going to defeat the aliens in the LOT episode, and then ….bye hallucination.
- Rory’s still the only one of the newbies that matters.
- These aliens are very, very disappointing villains.
- Who was the alien in charge of undressing everyone and putting them into those ugly pajamas? Inquiring minds want to know.
- Barry and Kara were around. I almost forgot!
What did you think of this episode of Arrow? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Arrow airs Wednesdays at 8/7c on The CW.
Lissete Lanuza Sáenz
Lawyer. Writer. Columnist. Geek. Falls in madly in love with fictional characters. Hates the color yellow, misogyny, and people who are late. Can always be found with a book. Watches an absurd amount of TV every week, often, while eating coffee ice cream. She has no regrets. You can check out her blog here: Absurday. Lissete is a senior writer for Tell-Tale TV. Follow @lizziethat
One thought on “Arrow Review: Invasion! (Season 5 Episode 8)”
“Real!Felicity’s characterization was ALL OVER THE PLACE. Was she ever worried about Oliver? She certainly didn’t look it. All she looked was …giddy.”
So damn true. She does tend to hide her true feelings behind jokes, but a little concern would have been nice, not only for Oliver but also for the others. Maybe she was just super confident in them and knew they would escape eventually haha
What I really liked about Felicity on this episode was how the various people had different concepts of who Felicity is: for Diggle she was a badass vigilante, for Ray she was the happy and smart fiancée, for Oliver it was the Smoak Technologies building aka the way out.
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