Arrow: Things You Might Have Missed In “The Recruits”

There were two really big things that happened on tonight’s episode of Arrow, and then there were a few little Easter eggs to keep them company.

This seemingly reflects the views of the showrunners; recently, Marc Guggenheim told Collider that he prefers the non-comics fans in the audience.

“My favorite fans of the shows are the people who are not comic book fans,” he said. “The truth of the matter is that a wildly successful comic book today sells 80,000 copies, but 80,000 viewers does not keep any show on the air. None of these shows exist without people who are not fans of the comics. We’re not burying you in backstory and the minutiae of who these characters are.”

With that mindset, and the look of the first two episodes of Arrow this season, don’t expect a ton of Easter eggs and shout-outs; it seems he’s more focused on trying to build a show that appeals to a broad base of people, and has DC characters in it, and that the clever winks and nods are more likely to be located on The Flash and Supergirl.

That doesn’t mean they’re absent on Arrow, of course: tonight there were a few, and we’ll run them down and ask you to chime in below if you saw any that we missed.

Check ’em out…!

THE SALMON LADDER

Despite what my Twitter feed will tell you, this exercise — something Oliver has made famous with the fan base — wasn’t actually invented for the show and named after actor Colin Salmon.

It’s pretty hilarious to see Curtis’s attempts at doing it, though, even if Oliver’s joke about Olympic training kind of brings up that uncomfortable realization that Curtis isn’t actually helpless, he’s a world-class athlete.

I’m counting this one as an Easter egg — barely — because I know that’s how it was being treated. Actors and writers talked about the idea of Curtis attempting the salmon ladder months ago.

AMERTEK

Even before they were the manufacturers of the Genesis Day missiles, Amertek were pretty sketchy characters.

Amertek Industries is a weapons manufacturer, tech conglomerate and defense contractor arguably best known for their biggest gun (literally and figuratively), the “Toastmaster” BG-80.

Designed by John Henry Irons, their brutality turned him off of weapons-making and he left Amertek to go into hiding, taking on the name Henry Johnson.

The guns would later make their way into the hands of street gangs in Metropolis and Washington, DC. Seeing his weapons on the streets, coupled with the then-recent death of his idol Superman, led Irons to take on the armored superhero identity of Steel. 

Amertek, finding that Irons had resurfaced, tried to kill him to silence his objections to the BG-80 program and even stole the designs for his Steel armor to make similar suits for their footsoldiers.

Amertek’s logo was one of a handful of DC Comics companies that appeared on the first-ever poster for The Flash.

RAGMAN

Tonight’s episode offered audiences a first look at Ragman, one of DC’s odder mystical antiheroes.

In the episode, Ragman was fixated on the corporaion known as Amertek, who were responsible for the creation of the bombs used by Damien Darhk on the so-called Genesis Day at the end of Arrow Season 4 when he tried to murder millions in order to power his dark magic.

Ragman’s family were among the thousands killed at Havenrock, a small city not far from Star City which was destroyed when Felicity redirected one of Darhk’s missiles there to minimize casualties when she couldn’t deactivate it.

In the comics, Ragman is a Gotham-based vigilante who wears the mystical Suit of Souls, from which his powers come. Created by Robert Kanigher and Joe Kubert, Ragman has a bit of a Ghost Rider thing going on, with the costume allowing him to take the souls of the guilty — except that in the case of Ragman, he can summon their abilities later in battle. By being used in this way, the evil can actually earn redemption and passage to Heaven.

Because of the supernatural nature of his powers and the fact that he’s in Gotham, he tends to creep people out. He’s been a part of various DC super-teams, although the most memorable recently is probaby his time in Bill Willingham’s excellent Shadowpact monthly.

Rory Regan’s family has passed the Ragman identity down through the centuries, including his father Gerry Regan, who apparently sacrificed himself to pass the suit along to Rory in the TV version.