Arrow Midseason Finale: Five Questions Raised

It's been a few days, but it took us that long to really process the level of awesome craziness that took place in "Three Ghosts," the season finale to Arrow. The episode, which scored a series high in the male 18-34 demographic, featured Barry Allen's second (and last, for now) appearance in Starling City as well as (spoiler!) the origin story that will segue into a pilot for The Flash, due in 2014. It did leave quite a few questions hanging in the air, though. Which do we hope we get some resolution on soon? Well, let's see...

Did Barry actually get anything out of his trip to Starling? It seems as though he didn't really get much out of this, right? I mean, he's following up abnormal stories because he wants insight into his mother's death and it seems unlikely that his mother's death had anything much to do with Mirakuru, which is all he really learned about here (except Ollie's secret and all that, but none of that is really relevant to his larger investigation). Still, he did put...something...up on his investigative corkboard. So maybe he feels like he got something out of it after all. Or maybe that's just Felicity's phone number.

What are they going to do with Roy? Since they introduced Roy Harper, he's seemed a bit...at sea. Clearly the writers have a long-term plan for the character, but it doesn't seem as though there have been a lot of clues seeded up to this point. Now that he's been shot up with the Mirakuru, though? Well, it seems as though there's some kind of modification in place that makes the users subject to the whim of Brother Blood--hence the unflappable devotion of Cyrus Gold, even after he became much too powerful to be effectively controlled by any means Blood had at his disposal. Will that mean we get a version of Roy who's got an adversarial relationship with Arrow? Well, the vigilante did shoot him in the leg without real explanation...! "What's fun for us, as writers, is we see what Roy's potential is to go down that dark path," series producer Andrew Kreisberg told CBR. "One of the things you'll find out as you go along is that it's a deep-seated anger inside of you that lets you survive the Mirakuru transformation, which is something Slade had, which is why he lives, and it's why Roy lived, too. One of the fun things that'll be happening in the back half of the year is his relationship with the Arrow, and how that changes, and how the Arrow basically makes it his mission to not let Roy go down the Slade path. That's going to take some interesting twists and turns that will hopefully surprise people." That's interesting because it seemingly equates Slade's madness with the brainwashing by Brother Blood; might we find that there's someone else pulling Slade's strings on the island as he starts to unravel?

What's Quentin's next move? Following the death of his partner, Detective(ish) Lance seems pretty lost. He's just recently regained Sara (kind of), but now his involvement with Arrow's cause has cost him another person dear to him and it may very well send him spiraling again. That could be a really combustible mix with Laurel, who's already seemingly in a pretty bad place herself. She's been (consciously or not) leaning on Quentin for support and if the two of them are both collapsing at once it could get ugly. There's also the pretty clear intimation--at least from our reading of the scene--that he could be seriously considering leaving the police force behind altogether. That's an interesting direction to take his character, and would call into question just what he role he could or would have in the series and in Arrow's quest going forward.

How do Slade and Brother Blood play into the League of Assassins? ...Or, do they? For the first half of the season, it seemed as though everything was revolving around the League of Assassins, and certainly there's still a thread of that floating around out there; there's Merlyn, certainly, but there's also the upcoming "Heir to the Demon" episode which will feature Nyssa al Ghul. But, as the midseason finale cliffhanger teased, it seems as though the rest of the season will be very Deathstroke-y: "That's very much the drive of the second half of the season. This year we're doing something a bit different. We've got a two-pronged approach to the bad guy. [As opposed to John Barrowman's recently returned Malcolm Merlyn, season one's main protagonist]," Greg Berlanti told CBR. "Because Oliver knows about the presence of one of the bad guys, it helps us change the rhythms of the back half of the year from what we may have done last year. We don't feel like we're breaking the same story, and people are enjoying a different show with more evolved characters."

Will we see Barry again this season? Originally, episode 20 of this year was meant to be a backdoor pilot for The Flash. We probably won't see Barry again now that he's getting a real-life, standalone pilot for his own series, but...what will they do with that extra episode? And is it too much to hope that it's awesomely DC Universe-centric?