In this week’s episode of Arrow, Oliver and Lyla come up with a plan to break Diggle out of prison. Felicity does not approve of the mission and chooses to stay behind. Meanwhile, Tobias Church decides to launch an attack on Star City, and Felicity has to decide whether or not to send the new Team Arrow to fight without Oliver.

Important Things to Know Going Into This Week’s Episode

Oliver’s supporting cast is getting stronger. He has finally entrusted his recruits to help him fight crime as vigilantes, and he has entrusted both Thea and Quentin to have very large roles in the Mayor’s office. This should free him up to be able to do both jobs more effectively and more fully. Hopefully, for Thea and Felicity’s sanity, that will be the case at least.

Speaking of Felicity, by the way, Oliver is bound to find out that she is dating somebody eventually, right? Eventually that’s going to come up, and we all know that Felicity is very awkward, especially about these types of things. I can’t imagine Oliver is going to take this well, because he can be very strange about Felicity with other guys.

Lastly, I can’t wait for more Russia scenes. I have always loved the flashback scenes to Oliver in the time he was “missing”, but this is my favorite. I’m really hopeful that we’ll see some incredible interactions with the Bratva, and that it will spark some great connections with present-day Oliver’s struggles.

The Biggest Moments in this week’s episode (SPOILERS!)

1. Growing Pains:

Oliver’s new team is definitely ready to fight, but they don’t seem to be ready to work as a team quite yet. If only they had continued the training mission that would have required them to work together to get past Oliver, similar to what he did at the Bratva. I know that if they had achieved that, they likely would have been able to stop Oliver from running off to break Diggle out of prison.

2. I definitely agree with Felicity…

While I understand that Diggle being in prison isn’t what we should want, but Oliver and Lyla breaking him out of prison, making him a fugitive for the rest of his life, all against his own wishes, that doesn’t make any sense. They should at least wait until he decides that he doesn’t belong there, then, if they break him out, he’ll at least be on the same page.

*Bonus point: In Oliver, Felicity, and Lyla’s conversation, I realized something; John Diggle Jr. (the new Green Arrow from season 1 of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow) now actually exists as a result of Flashpoint. Not huge news, but definitely really cool.

3. Tobias Church is smart!

Letting his man get caught so that his bomb would end up in the evidence locker that he really wanted to get into was a damn good plan! Oliver, Quentin, Adrian (DA), none of them figured it out. Curtis was the closest to realizing that something was wrong. This is just another aspect of the team needing to work together more in order to be as effective as possible in their current objectives.

4. Oliver’s prison break:

It was cool to watch Oliver and Lyla figure out a way to free Diggle. I like how everything seemingly worked perfectly, until the prison randomly chose to put Diggle into gen. pop. (general population). Obviously it wouldn’t make sense for the whole plan to go off without a hitch. This was a weird wrinkle though. At least, at the end, they were able to pull it off and save Diggle. The fact that he actually got on board made it that much better! That plane at the end of the rescue was also incredibly awesome!

5. The team’s big moment:

With Oliver gone, Team Arrow has to step up big to stop Church from attacking the crime squad headquarters. If Oliver was there, it would have been a hard mission, fighting without him made it almost impossible. This was exactly what the team needed though, they were forced to fight as a team to make it all work, and without that, they would have failed miserably. They did lose Wild Dog, and Curtis was injured, showing that they need more training, but overall, they were successful.

Ryan’s Speculation of the week:

Diggle is going to make Team Arrow significantly stronger. If he teams up with Oliver and the crew again, as I assume he will, he will be the middle ground between Oliver’s expectations and the team’s hopes. He’ll be able to help bridge that gap, complete their training, and make the whole team dynamic significantly better. Ideally, it will also help Felicity step into a bigger role, because she’ll now have backup if there is ever a disagreement with Oliver’s choices.

Arrow airs on The CW on Wednesdays. Leave a comment and let me know what you thought about this episode.