Arrow Recap With Spoilers: The Recruits

The episode starts with Wild Dog chasing down a suspect. When he trips and falls off the edge of a building, though, Green Arrow catches him with a bolo arrow. Oliver gives him a quickie lecture and offers him an opportunity to join Team Arrow.

Back at the lair, Curtis fails miserably at the salmon ladder. Oliver tells Curtis that he's got further to go than the rest of the recruits, so he's going to be challenged the most. He tells the team that all three of them are going to be wearing masks while they train the recruits, since they don't know the recruits yet.

Elsewhere, Diggle is going to lead a military operation in Chechnya. After a short meeting, he mentors a young soldier who's scared about going out on the mission -- his first.

At the office of the mayor, Oliver successfully pitches Amertek to underwrite a free medical event that can help take care of the victims of the city's crime epidemic.

Oliver tells Thea after they've left that he's putting together a new team. She realizes this means she's stuck covering his butt more at the mayor's office for the foreseeable future, so she starts trying to put together a team of her own.

In the lair, Oliver challenges the recruits to an exercise -- try and get past him and ring a bell. They all fail. Repeatedly.

In the flashback, more or less the same exercise again -- except Oliver is one of the recruits, and it's the Bratva who are hosting.

In Starling City, a man talking about stops to give a homeless guy some money -- but when he walks away, the homeless guy turns out to be a hooded, ragged figure, who attacks him from behind.

Back at the lair, Oliver reveals that the man attacked is in the ICU after seemingly being smothered. The man was a vice president at Amertek, the company that was helping with Oliver's charity event. The Amertek CEO wants to pull out due to concerns of safety and legal concerns. Oliver promises that the city will accept responsibility if anythign happens, and that he will triple police presence at the event, so she agrees to stay.

Overseas, Diggle's operation doesn't go particularly well. Two men are shot in short order and one of them, still alive, believes that the bad guys knew they were coming.

At the lair, Green Arrow is still beating on the recruits. They're starting to get agitated. Before the confrontation can escalate, though, Felicity calls Green Arrow away and tells him that they have footage indicating the attacker of the Amertek VP was enhanced in some way. Felicity convinces him to bring the team with him to the charity event.

He does -- and it's not a bad idea. The Amertek CEO is attacked almost immediately after the event starts by a man who seems to have living clothing reaching out to strangle her. Oliver gets a shot in at the ragman, but when a little girl is in the crosshairs, Wild Dog (not in costume, but undercover as a volunteer) tackles him and tears a piece off.

Back at the lair, Oliver explodes at the recruits for not staying out of sight like he ordered them. Felicity pulls him away to tell him that Wild Dog got some evidence from the ragman. Oliver leaves to go deal with the fallout of the event at the mayor's office.

At Diggle's op, the young soldier he pep-talked eariler is injured and the two decide to case the building. Soon after they split up, Diggle is disarmed by a group of American soldiers who are going to steal the weapon they're ostensibly there to get out of the hands of the rebels.

At the police department, Felicity gives the rag -- and a long story filled with lies about where it came from -- to her boyfriend to get it analyzed because the computers in the Arrowcave are down.

At the mayor's office, Thea has hired on Quentin in order to help him crawl out of the bottle, but Oliver objects --- and then gets a text from Felicity and leaves.

Wild Dog and Artemis have quit the team already, and Curtis and Felicity are upset. Oliver tells Curtis that the goal of the exercise was to get the three of them to work togeter. Curtis yells at Oliver about what a bad leader he is, and says he quits, too.

Alone with Felicity later, Oliver is sulking about failing the recruits, and he says tells her that he was using Bratva techniques -- depersonalizing people so that losing them doesn't hurt you -- on the recruits. He thinks part of the reason the fall of Team Arrow hurt him so much is that he let them in.

Felicity tells him that it's Oliver Queen, not the Green Arrow, she wants to follow and so will the recruits.

In the flashbacks, Oliver figures out how to ring the bell and beat the exercise: by working together. He talks the other Bratva recruits into following his lead, but after he "wins," the others are killed by the lieutenant.

Back in the present, Thea sees the CEO of Amertek making a deal with Tobias Church to sell him enough weaponry to "take over a country."

Overseas, the corrupt soldiers kill Dig's young recruit and tell him that he's "solved their problem."

At the mayor's office, Thea tealls Oliver what she learned, and she and Felicity are frustrated when he decides to try and fix it on his own instead of using the team. Along the way, Felicity reveals that the rag is thousands of years old and tinged with radiation from one of the Genesis bombs Damien Darhk launched (like the inert one Diggle has been chasing down.

Green Arrow infiltrates Church's meeting with Amertek's CEO -- but not before Ragman does. Ragman, as it turns out, is motivated to find justice for the only bomb that "found its mark" on Genesis Day -- the one Felicity dropped on Havenrock. Felicity watches him explain this to the Amertek CEO while Oliver is getting beat on by Church. At the last minute before Church can stab him with an arrow, Oliver shouts to Ragman, who hurls Church. The Amertek CEO gets away, but Oliver tells him to let her go, that it's over.

On a rooftop, Oliver connects with Ragman, whose father saved him on Genesis Day by giving him the Ragman suit. Oliver tells him that his father would have wanted something better for him, not for him to be a vengeful murderer. Oliver admits that he needs a team and he can't do it alone. He asks Ragman to honor the legacies of their fathers together, and the pair shake hands.

In Russia, Oliver challenges Anatoly, who says that the first part of initiation is realizing that the only one he can trust is himself.

In Chechnya, the corrupt soldiers are asking Diggle to sign a confession that he killed the soldier from earlier. Diggle refuses, and the head of the crooked ones says that his men will all testify against Diggle, so good luck with his court martial.

At City Hall, Quentin shows up for a meeting with Thea, and tries to walk out, saying that he knows she's figured out he's drinking. She offers him the Deputy Mayor job, on the condition he stops drinking. She asks him to do it for Laurel.

At the Lair, Oliver tells Felicity that he allowed Church to get the better of him to trust Ragman, and that he's not done yet. The recruits are waiting for him, and he unmasks to ask them to come back and stand with him. Everyone signs on, in spite of Wild Dog hating his codename.

Outside of a nightclub, Tobias Church is beaten badly by a man who calls himself Prometheus, and says that Green Arrow is his to kill.