"Inmate 4587" – Arrow S07E01 Review

Well, I've got one week "off" this week, since DC's Legends of Tomorrow doesn't premiere until next week. Sorry, but I've only got enough in me to typically review one episode a night, and I've always liked Legends better. Maybe if it was on opposite Arrow I could review both. But having it on at 9/8 central an hour later is going to kill me if I try to review it and Arrow. I'm sure somebody else will step up and review Arrow.

But that leaves me with this week. So...

To refresh everyone on what happened in the season 6 finale, there was a season long fight between Team Arrow and Ricardo Diaz, aka Dragon (Kirk Acevedo). There was also a season long fight within Team Arrow, as the new kids on the block--Black Canary Mk. 2 (Juliana Harkavy), Wild Dog (Rick Gonzalez), and Mr. Terrific (Echo Kellum)--rebelled against Green Arrow (Stephen Amell) being a big ole bag of dicks. Even Diggle (David Ramsey) and Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards) got sick of Arrow's "My way or the highway" routine and left him, even though Felicity was still his wife.

Just to add to the fun, the Laurel Lance of Earth-2 (Katie Cassidy) showed up to remind everyone she wasn't done with the Arrowverse. Laurel has a metahuman superscream power, and teamed up with Diaz for a while, but got sick of his increasingly violent ways after he set an old schoolmate on fire. Good times.

The season ended with Green Arrow's secret identity of Oliver Queen, mayor of Star City, being outed. In return for the FBI granting the rest of the team immunity, Oliver confessed, pled guilty, and went to prison. The rest of the team went their separate ways, sort of. And that brings us up to the new season.

Felicity and Oliver's son William (Jack Moore) went into witness protection, except I guess they came out of it after five months. Does witness protection work that way? Oliver is in prison having nightmares of Diaz hunting them down and killing Felicity. Meanwhile, Oliver tries to keep a low profile and avoid trouble so that he can serve his time, get out of prison, and reunite with his family.

Diggle is working as the head of the secret government organization ARGUS in Star City, and Curtis is the organization's head of R&D. We don't find out about either of them, except Curtis is drinking too much coffee (okay, he acts that way all the time), and Diggle is in hot water for dedicating ARGUS efforts to tracking down Diaz, who disappeared at the end of last season.

Laurel is the mayor of Star City. We don't find out how that happened or why the team is putting up with it. I suppose they don't have a choice. Unfortunately, there's no Earth-2 paternity test. Dinah aka Black Canary Mk. 2, is the police chief since Captain Lance died last season. Rene is running a boxing gym in the Glades, Star City's ghetto.

The main plot is Oliver in prison. The always-talented Vinnie Jones is there, playing his character Danny Brickwell. Michael Jai White briefly shows up as Ben Turner: he previously was Bronze Tiger on Arrow and a member of the Suicide Squad before they ix-nayed that because of the Suicide Squad movie. There's no mention of his previous Bronze Tiger career, so it's a blink-and-you-might-miss-it moment that I can only figure is there because Mr. Jai White had a week off in his schedule.

Filling in for Turner after he ends up in solitary is Derek Sampson (wrestler Cody Runnels, billed as Cody Rhodes). Sampson showed up for a couple of episodes back in season 5, and gained an immunity to pain as a result of exposure to a drug cloud. There's no mention of that immunity.

After Turner ends up in the hole because he picks a fight with Oliver, Derek and Danny want Oliver to fill in for him. Oliver refuses and they threaten Oliver's family. When that doesn't work, they beat up some guy named Stanley (Benjamin Fletcher) who claims he's innocence and is mostly there to prick Oliver's conscience. In the end, Oliver beats up Danny and some guy rather than keep going passive, and lets the guards take him away.

Diaz finally does locate Felicity, who is working as a barista. He beats her up and prepares to shoot her. We later find out ARGUS showed up just in time and he fled. Given that Diggle said earlier they were putting Felicity under 24/7 surveillance, I'm not too impressed with them. Felicity visits Oliver in prison, tells him what happened, and sends William away so she can fight back. What that means, we'll see.

There's a new Green Arrow in Star City, going after both sides of an arm-selling operation. Dinah wants to bring him in because he's a criminal and because he's putting the team's immunity deal at risk. Rene sees first-hand how the people of Star City are losing hope and is all for the new Green Arrow. When Dinah and her officers surround Green Arrow Mk. 2, Rene puts on his Wild Dog costume and helps the new vigilante escape. Laurel stresses the city's zero-tolerance penalty for vigilantes, but I recall her leading an attack on Central City a few years back, and then they locked her up in the pipeline. Adrian got her freed, but his reputation is shot to hell, too. So why Flash & Co. are willing to give Laurel a pass on that, I don't know. Sometimes inter-show continuity sucks.

Throughout this, we get scenes of a young guy paying a boat captain to take him to the island of Lian Yu. When the guy gets there, a hooded archer captures him. At the end we find out that the young guy is an adult William (Ben Lewis), and the hooded archer is Roy (Colton Haynes, also now listed as a series regular). So instead of flashbacks, we get flashforwards now. At least Haynes has better hair than he had on American Horror Story last year, even if blonde-white is his preferred hair color.

And that's about it. There's a lot of stuff going on, and Laurel, Diggle, and Curtis get short shrift this time around as the premiere sets up the basic groundwork. Oliver is in prison (at least for a while), but will probably be out in time for the Arrowverse crossover. Diaz is still out there (and Kirk Acevedo is now billed as a series regular). We're going to have flash-forward from now on, which should confuse things even further with the future bits we've seen on DC's Legends. Rene and Dinah are on opposite sides of the whole Is he good/is he bad/psychopath or sexy cad? thing with the new Green Arrow. Whose identity remains unidentified at the end of the premiere, although we do find out he has a list of his own that he's crossing names off of.

Oliver goes through pretty much all of the standard prison clichés except rape. Because Arrow is a CW show, I suppose. There's unsympathetic guards, and obnoxious prisoners, and shower scenes (with convenient anti-nudity cover), and a hapless prisoner in for a crime that he didn't commit. But I suppose you work with what you got, and what will probably be at best a short onscreen prison stay (do they have crossover prison leaves?) is something they don’t need to dwell on too much.

Overall, "Inmate" does what The Flash and Supergirl did with their premieres. Ease its audience gently back into the status quo, bring what happened to the characters up to speed, and lay out what will be the major plot points for at least the first half season. Whether DC's Legends goes the same route next week, we'll see. They've got a bit more reshuffling to do, with Matt Ryan coming on and Maisie Richardson-Sellers taking on a different character.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?