Title: Arrow: “Lost Canary” Review
Release Date: April 15th, 2019
Network: The CW
Genre: Superhero, Drama, Action
I don’t know why but it’s hard for me to get back into Arrow and The Flash after a long hiatus. This happened last time too.
Arrow season 2 featured an episode with Earth-1 Laurel Lance, Sara Lance (who was the Black Canary at the time), and Huntress at the forefront called “Birds of Prey” (awesome episode by the way). In a sense, “Lost Canary” kinda felt like a long-awaited second part of that episode. And, for the most part, it worked.
I haven’t necessarily had a problem with Dinah in a long time. Really since that short stint in season 6 where we had that terrible “Team Arrow Civil War”. I’ve been invested in her character this season, mainly due to the flashforwards and what happened to her in “Star City Slayer”. However, I found Dinah to be pretty annoying this week (and I’m vastly understating that). This has nothing to do with Juliana Harkavy’s performance either. She did the best with what she was given. I get that Dinah doesn’t like Laurel, and that’s completely fine. But the way she just adamantly kept putting down Felicity’s points and dismissing the notion of Laurel being redeemed just took me out of the episode.
Dinah eventually came around and the ending was fantastic. We’ll get to the flashforwards later but I loved the Laurel reveal because it showed how much Dinah has grown as a character. I just thought the way we got there was executed poorly.
That’s probably the best way I can describe “Lost Canary”. Loved the destination but I just thought the journey we took to get there was subpar. Laurel’s arc is another piece of evidence to my description. Anyone who has read my reviews of Arrow this season knows that I’ve enjoyed watching Laurel’s redemption arc from heartless killer to a hero. This week almost unraveled every single bit of that character development.
After all of that time spent into developing Laurel, we went from her being outed as Black Siren to her being in full villain mode in the span of one episode. It was jarring to see and I kept thinking that there was some twist on the way. At one point, I thought she was playing both the team and Shadow Thief in order to find the bomb and take down the assassin to prove her loyalty or something. I was totally off. Instead, she was dead-set on going back to the dark side until Felicity and Sara talked her out of it.
That being said, Katie Cassidy is underrated. Seriously. Her improvement as an actor over the seasons of Arrow can only be rivaled by Stephen Amell. And that’s debatable. I sincerely hope she’s coming back for the final season as a regular.
Sara Lance returned this week to help out Felicity and try to keep Laurel’s public figure intact. I haven’t been keeping up with Legends of Tomorrow this season, which is a travesty on its own, so seeing Caity Lotz as Sara was awesome. She fit right back in as if she never left the show to go battle magical demons using the power of Beebo. It felt like I was supposed to be invested in Dinah and Felicity’s scenes but the ones that stood out to me involved Sara and Laurel. Sara has a point. She’s done terrible and seemingly irredeemable things too. So has Oliver. There’s no reason why Laurel can’t make a difference and redeem herself.
I thought the action, surprisingly, was a little spotty. The light fixture part was just weird. But, the final fight of the episode was all I wanted this week (that knee to the face was epic). I can forgive everything else.
The flashforwards this week were primarily used to set up the big reveal that Laurel was still around and is a Black Canary again. Felicity giving Laurel the suit in the present day and then revealing it in the flashforwards was superbly done. They did a decent job with aging up Katie Cassidy a bit as well. Other than that, I didn’t really care for anything else here. The same can be said for Diggle and Oliver’s subplot. Which only gave me the revelation that the Longbow Hunters were extremely underdeveloped. It took me a while to realize that they were interrogating one of them. Let’s be honest here, you had to think about it for a second too.
Verdict: “Lost Canary” is a solid return for Arrow and eased me back into the series as we hit our final stretch of episodes. Performances by Katie Cassidy and Caity Lotz were standouts. Emily Bett Rickards was pretty great as well. For me, this week was about the destination, not the journey and that’s my best description on the episode as a whole. If this was Laurel’s sendoff for a while in the present day, it was a worthy one. But, hopefully, we’ll see her again sometime soon.
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