Arrow: The Huntress Returns Review

Can the seventeenth episode of the season keep up the ante?
Something which I've often been able to credit Arrow with is that in particular, its mid-season return episodes have been consistently impressive. Sadly, The Huntress Returns doesn't quite continue that illustrious trend in such high-flying fashion. Whereas past premiere episodes in the run have been innovative and noteworthy in their plot developments, this seventeenth episode of Season One feels more like a filler outing than anything.

I'll start with the positive angle, though. Jessica De Gouw was a likeable actress in her role as Helena (aka the Huntress) earlier this season in her dedicated two-parter, so it was at least great to see her back in action as a relatively empathetic daughter with a vendetta against her loathsome father. On top of that, Doctor Who's very own River Song, Ms Alex Kingston, burst back into town in quite a big way, although to some extent her character's arc this week was largely explaining the rather sudden cliffhanger that she received at the end of the past run earlier in March. These two strong cast portrayals worked well alongside those of Stephen Amell (Oliver), Colin Donnell (Tommy) and David Ramsey (Diggle), as ever a flexible main cast capable of tackling a variety of adaptive storylines.

However, this time around there were just a few too many shortcomings to forgive and forget in lieu of a 4* rating or above. First and foremost, there was quite simply too much going on this week in terms of the various plot arcs. I've often said that what lets down hit US dramas such as Game Of Thrones and Elementary on some occasions is their stubbornness in attempting to shoehorn as many different strands of an overarching narrative into a single weekly instalment, and that's the case here to a large extent. It's difficult to keep track of everything that's happening with Oliver and his cop crush, Oliver and Helena, Oliver and Tommy, Thea and Roy Harper and the Lance family at once, not to mention the various flashbacks to the Green Arrow's time on that ever-mysterious island for five years.

Worse still, far from any of the various narrative strands having any meaningful resolution to open more doors for deeper plot exploration, each of them was left on an awkward tangent. The increasingly irksome Huntress can still pop up into future seasons at any time that a filler episode is required thanks to her convenient getaway, cop McKenna could potentially crop up as a distraction in the love triangle of Oliver-Tommy-Laurel late in Season Two, the Lance family might as well have made no progress whatsoever with finding Sarah and Moira is no closer to keeping Malcolm off her track. This reviewer would have had a far more positive outlook on the episode as a whole had one or two of these arcs at the very least developed towards a climax, yet that couldn't have been further from the case here.

We're left, then, with a mid-season premiere episode that struggles to understand its own identity, the path it wishes to take. Far from maintaining a focus on some of the core elements of the hefty Arrow lore the season's writers have crafted for themselves, the production team instead chose to sporadically alternate between all of these arcs at once, causing a worrying sense of disconnection to pervade this instalment. Arrow: The Huntress Returns certainly isn't the worst episode this pretty strong Season One has provided viewers with, but it's far from the best, and it's certainly one of the weakest outings we've seen for some time. With just six episodes remaining until the season finale hit, we're left hoping that the writers can pick up the pace and episode quality in time to make Season Two a must-see prospect.
3.5/5