Spoilers ahead for tonight’s episode of Arrow, titled “Monument Point.”
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In tonight’s episode of Arrow, titled “Monument Point,” Team Arrow fought to stop a nuclear missile from annihilating the titular city.
They succeeded in saving the city and its millions of inhabitants, but did so only by spoofing the missile’s GPS: it touched down outside of a much smaller city and killed tens of thousands.
During his time writing Justice Society of America, Arrow showrunner Marc Guggenheim created both Monument Point and its suburb of Havencroft, the town he wiped off the map in tonight’s episode of Arrow.
Generally, we take time out to do an “Easter eggs and DC Comics references” type story every week. This week there were certainly a number of DC characters, with Anarky returning and references to Mr. Terrific, etc., but they’ve already been pretty extensively covered, and other than recurring references like that, the only things we found of note were…well, cities.
Besides Monument Point and Havencroft, the episode mentioned Markovia and Corto Maltese, two of the more important prior DC locations that have been referenced.
That Markovia got mentioned in the same episode as the Earthquake Machine from Season One is likely no coincidence: referenced in “State Vs. Queen,” Markovia is not only the country that serves as the namesake of the Markov Machine.
In Arrow, Dr. Brion Markov was a scientist working for Unidac Industries. He developed the Markov Device, which has the power to cause an earthquake. Malcolm Merlyn used Brion’s device as part of the core plan related to The Undertaking. However, after he was done with him, he killed him and his colleagues so he could not reveal anything to anyone. In the comics, though, Markov is Geo-Force, a superhero with geo-kinesis abilities that was also prince of Markovia.
(Thanks, Arrow Wiki; that’s more concise than I could have put it!)
Geo-Force has ties to the Outsiders and the Suicide Squad, two teams that have seen a number of their members appear on Arrow.
So…if Brion wasn’t a superhero, had to have a machine do all his earthquaking for him, and wasn’t a prince, who runs Markovia? Might we see Terra?
Then there’s Corto Maltese. Named after an island off the coast of South America, the locale was created for Frank Miller’s classic The Dark Knight Returns. It was referenced in Arrow‘s first season, when Oliver said that Deadshot had been operating out of the island prior to arriving in Starling City, and then referenced again in the Arrow episode “Corto Maltese.”
In The Dark Knight Returns, Corto Maltese was at the center of an event very much like the Cuban Missile Crisis. Since that event involved the Soviets, it could also be that the KGBeast is involved. His alter ego, Anatoli Knyazev, appeared regularly throughout Arrow‘s second season and most recently appeared as a main antagonist in Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice.
The Corto Maltese revolution was an event referenced in 1989’s Batman, repeatedly cited as the news story for which Vicki Vale won international acclaim.
