‘Arrow’: Easter Eggs and Pop Culture References in “Inmate 4587”

Arrow returned to our television screens with quite a bang tonight, and brought fans a fair share of DC Comics homages along the way.

Spoilers for tonight’s episode of Arrow, “Inmate 4587”, below!

The episode jumped five months after Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) unmasked himself as the Green Arrow, after he surrendered himself to the FBI and agreed to serve a life sentence in prison. As the episode showed, things have gotten pretty gnarly for everyone in Oliver’s orbit, both inside Slabside Prison and outside of it.

The episode provided a fair share of references and Easter eggs, whether to DC Comics lore, the canon that Arrow has acquired over the years, or to the world of pop culture. So, let’s run down what we found. If you see anything we missed, let us know in the comments below!

Beginning With a Run

 

The episode opened with a scene of Felicity (Emily Bett Rickards) and William (Jack Moore) running through a forest, as Ricardo Diaz (Kirk Acevedo) attempts to hunt them down and kill them.

As we quickly learn, this is actually just a nightmare sequence that Oliver is having in prison, but that doesn’t mean the scene isn’t without its significance.

The shot of William running while wearing a hood calls back to a sequence seen throughout Arrow, from multiple season premieres to the 100th episode, where Oliver races through the woods in some sort of capacity. 

Prisoner #4587

From there, we cut to Oliver’s time in prison, where he is addressed by one of the guards as “Prisoner #4587”.

While this might not be the most obvious of Easter eggs, it serves as an homage to the agent number used by Vinnie Terranova on the late-80s TV series Wiseguy.

Returning Villains

As some eagle-eyed Arrow fans noticed in the Season 7 trailer, Oliver is crossing paths with some familiar faces during his time at Slabside, with several previous villains of the week factoring into this week’s episode.

The first is Derek Samson (Cody Rhodes), who confronts Oliver in the showers of the prison. Up next is Bronze Tiger (Michael Jai White), who clearly has a bone to pick with Oliver despite his time on the Suicide Squad. And the third is Brick (Vinnie Jones) who went from wanting to take over the Glades to leading a gang in the prison.

Slabside

And of course, Slabside in and of itself is a DC Comics homage, referencing a metahuman prison that has been a part of the comics since 1994.

“The Slab” has a weird tie to Green Arrow itself, as the prison was rumored to serv as part of the setting for the Green Arrow: Escape From SuperMax film. The project, which was developed by Man of Steel and The Dark Knight co-writer David S. Goyer before being dropped, featured Oliver Queen being wrongfully imprisoned and had to sneak out of a Supermax prison.

Rumor was that it was going to be The Slab that he escaped from, although a leaked script purported to be genuine doesn’t feature that name.

Hope Springs

From there, the episode took us to Felicity and William, who have been hiding in Witness Protection for the past several months.

Where were they hiding? Hope Springs, a midwestern town with a weird tie to the comics. Green Lantern and Green Arrow most notably visited the West Virginian town during their “Hard Travelin’ Heroes” time in the 1970s, back when the town was called “Desolation”.

Radu’s Coffee

(Photo: The CW)

Arrow‘s time in Hope Springs also brought another pretty sly reference — this time to Radu’s Coffee, the place where Felicity works.

The locale most prominently factors into the ’90s runs of Green Lantern, as a “trendy” coffee shop that Kyle Rayner frequented, and once lived above.

News 52

Back in Star City, Laurel Lance’s (Katie Cassidy) press conference about the new Green Arrow gave us one of the most consistent Easter eggs the show has ever had — the news mic for Channel 52 News.

As fans surely know, this is a reference to DC’s “New 52” line of continuity, and has popped up in the larger Arrowverse quite a bit.

Hozen

Towards the end of the episode, Felicity gave William a parting gift before sending him off to boarding school — one that will surely tug on the heartstrings of Arrow fans.

In the early episodes of Arrow, Oliver gave Thea Queen (Willa Holland) a Hozen, a Japanese arrowhead that he had found on one of the bodies of Lian Yu. The rock contained coordinates that helped Oliver and company against Professor Ivo, and it also proved as a catalyst for Oliver, Thea, and Roy’s various dynamics over the years.

‘Count of Monte Cristo’

And of course, no prison storyline in film and TV is quite complete without an homage to Count of Monte Cristo.

The iconic novel follows Edmond Dantes, who is falsely accused of treason and thrown in prison. Ultimately, he and his fellow prisoners attempt to organize a jail break, which makes the fact that Oliver has it in his cell a little interesting.

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Arrow airs Mondays at 8/7c on The CW.