Arrow – S6E12 – All For Nothing

Previously on Arrow, “We Fall”

This week’s Arrow tried (and failed) to invest us in the relationship between Vincent and Dinah, before unceremoniously offing him with a canary cry to the brain. After a season or so of building up the Vigilante as a callous villain, giving us just one episode of character development was too little too late to give his death any meaning.

The Good

As with last week, it’s great to see the canary cry used for more than throwing people into walls. Watching Vincent’s brain turn to mush from the inside was refreshingly gruesome for a show that mostly sticks to bullets, arrows, and explosions.

The Bad

The writers must have heard how happy everyone was to be done with the flashbacks this season, and yet decided to bring them back this episode anyway, inexplicably centered around a storyline that has already been established, about the character that people care about the least.

Alena showing up for a brief scene of exposition seemed like a terrible waste of an actress of her caliber. Hopefully they’re lulling us into a false sense of security and she’s actually the next big bad, but I’m not holding my breath.

This episode managed to stand out as extremely grim in a show that is known for its darkness. Normally the gloominess is tempered by an overabundance of quips, but this episode was noticeably joke free. If the death had been that of a more interesting character, then the humorlessness may have worked to add gravity to the situation, but in this case it just made for a boring and dreary hour of television.

Quote of the Week

Felicity: “We turned your room into a home gym, because… because this extremely awkward situation needs to be masked with humor.”