It seems like no one stays dead for very long on ARROW. It turns out that Diggle’s brother, Andy, was not so dead, after all. But the reality of that fact hit John really hard because Andy is definitely not the guy Dig thought he was.
When Team Arrow is doing a routine mission to stop the Ghosts’ actions, things escalate quickly. During a fight, John shoots one of the Ghosts and decides to take off his mask to finally learn the identity of one of them, but to his complete and utter shock he finds himself staring at his very much alive brother. When Diggle got that file from Damien Dahk – through Lance – I thought it was strange that they seemed to wrapping up this storyline so quickly. It was too easy; there had to be more to this whole mess than just John finding out his brother was dirty, right? After all, weren’t the producers promoting this season as “the year of Diggle”?
To my absolute relief, the Andy Diggle storyline is nowhere near finished and, let me tell you, they do not explore David Ramsey’s talent enough. Last night just proved to me that – just like we saw with Emily Bett Rickards last week – we have only scratched the surface with Ramsey and I really, really hope they give him some juicier plots as we advance into the season.
Dig finds out Andy is alive and well and, apparently, one of Dahrk’s soldiers. But to everyone’s surprise, he is not at all willing to rescue him. The disappointment and anger at finding out that the brother he had once thought so highly of has criminal ties seem to be too much for Dig and he wants nothing to do with even the plan of rescuing Andy. It takes a lot of convincing from Oliver for him to agree to go scout out a location that Lance discovered for them and – even then – he doesn’t let anyone but Oliver come with him. They nearly get themselves killed and don’t make any progress on the Andy front, but they do find out that Dahrk gives his ghosts something that makes them susceptible to suggestion.
Meanwhile, Oliver’s mayoral campaign is taking off and he has a couple of appearances to make in some big events in Star City. They attend a gala that honors SCPD and, after Oliver gives his speech, Damien Dahrk approaches him and asks to talk. When they are alone, Dahrk basically threatens him that he should forget about his plans to revitalize the Bay Area and that they could do great things together. When Oliver asks him what would happen if he refused, Dahrk gets all pissy and says Oliver wouldn’t run unopposed anymore.
The thing is, Oliver sees this as an opportunity to infiltrate HIVE and a chance to save Andy. Dig wants him to let it go already, and so does Felicity. She reminds him that he decided to run for mayor in order to do things for Star City that he couldn’t do as the Green Arrow; things he could do in the light of day.
While all this is happening, Felicity enlists Ray’s help to try and crack the DNA on that tooth John extracted from one of the ghosts a couple of episodes back, remember? The one with only half a DNA. Of course, Ray being Ray, he cracks it and even finds a base of operations where the ghosts are. Felicity keeps insisting on the fact that he should return to his life and get his company back, but he admits to her that he has been catching up on everything he has missed in the past six months, and he feels like all his hard work didn’t accomplish much and he needs to figure out what he wants to do next – but he doesn’t want to go back to his previous life. This is, very obviously, the set up for his move to LEGENDS OF TOMORROW in the crossover, so it looks like he will find a purpose in life pretty soon.
Anyway, they storm the place and manage to get Andy out, but hey, it turns out that he really is a bad guy, after all. Apparently.
Meanwhile, Thea is fighting the blood lust again and she nearly kills a guy who tries to hit on her while she is on a date with Alex, Oliver’s campaign advisor. Malcolm pays a visit to her and tells her she should do something about it, but she tells him to leave her alone, once and for all. But when she is fighting to rescue Andy, she runs into Damien Dahrk and when he tries to use his creepy power on her, something weird happens. It seems to backfire and it takes away her blood lust somehow, at least for a little while. So now she wants Malcolm’s help to try and make that permanent. What was really interesting about this, though, was that, not only it didn’t work on her, but it seemed to turn on Dahrk as well, which could really come in handy.
That said, my heart broke in a million little pieces for Dig and I really hope they manage to save Andy from himself, somehow. “Brotherhood” served to solidify even more this beautiful friendship between Diggle and Oliver and it was so great to see that they are back to being brothers. The scene where Dig saves Oliver’s ass – both times, actually – was awesome. The moment he says “I had to save my brother. The green one” was especially touching.
What did you think? Hit the comments below and tell me all about it, or come talk to me on Twitter.
Don’t miss an all new episode of ARROW on December 2 at 8/7c on The CW.