Arrow Advance Review: "The Promise" Is Big And Awesome--But It's All The Little Things

Tonight's episode of Arrow has been lauded as a game-changing one that raises the bar for the show, raises the stakes for the rest of the season and makes the first season's finale "look like a student film from the '80s." That's largely fair - but how does an episode like this stand on its own in the age of Internet spoilers? The CW seemingly blew a large chunk of the plot (in addition to spoiling the end of last week's "Time of Death" when they released the promotional photos for the episode last Tuesday, showing Slade Wilson palling around with Moira Queen. That's the end of the spoilers, by the way, inasmuch as I can help it, anyway. Since that had already aired as the ending of "Time of Death," it's not connected to the screeners given to reporters yesterday but something anybody could already know if they were up-to-date on the show.

In any event, the official synopsis, released even earlier than that, had told us the basic premise of both the present-day and island conflicts: Slade, they let us know, is officially now the villain. We see the transition happen on the island this episode--and while it's more or less what we've been expecting for a couple of months now, they manage it cleverly and without too many of the problems that are inherent to the premise. What's meant by that: One way or another, it had to come from Oliver, of course. If Slade cornered Ivo, ready to kill him, and the scientist tried to throw responsibility on Slade's friend, it's likely that our Deathstroke-in-waiting wouldn't have believed him, and would have just finished him off then and there -- maybe asking Oliver about it later, but more likely assuming that the mad scientist/kidnapper/torturer was lying. With Oliver and Sara trying to avoid telling Slade, there had to be a middle ground, and they found it cleverly here. I'm still not sure that I buy the premise that throwing yourself in front of a gun about to be fired at your friend constitutes choosing to let the other person die -- it was easier to read, I felt, as a selfless, almost unconscious act than as a conscious decision of preference. But everyone from Oliver on down has accepted the version of events as stated by Ivo, so we'll have to just buy the premise and move forward. There are a couple of places where that's true in any show, and Arrow has needed less generosity on the part of its viewers this season than it did last year (or than any number of other perfectly good shows ask for weekly). The episode is a triumph of characterization and craft, making it one of the year's most memorable episodes even though the plot itself was mostly spoiled. They take advantage of an episode that focuses on world-building rather than plot by giving Oliver's team a build-up episode; their role in the episode isn't huge, but they're learning the stakes for the rest of the season along with Oliver and trying to position themselves to defend their ground. There's some action in the episode, but it's mostly on the island. It's nice because this is a big, spectacular episode, but what makes it large and what drives the spectacle is all acting and filmmaking. This episode more than any other flies in the face of the low expectations many viewers have for a superhero show, or a CW show, or both.

This episode has to do with consequences, and everyone has to pay them. We get a look at Ivo's true motivations (spoiler alert: it's not -- or at least not just about "saving the world") and get a sense for what his personal stakes are, so that for the first time, it's (a tiny bit) harder to root for him to die violently...but once the abstract nature of his larger mission is taken away and replaced with specifics, that means there's a thing that can be taken away from him, and it opens him up to consequences that would have been hard to predict a week ago. Much of the episode takes place on the island, with the modern-day story at the Mansion taking a decided back seat...although it moves the story forward, and it does give us at least one major question that needs answering soon. The answer, as it happens, may be buried in the story of the island, but we'll have to wait to find that out. While much of the episode has already been revealed online, the premise itself is hardly the whole story. There's a game-changing development on the island that will shape the rest of this season (and possibly season three) as well as a major misdirect early in the episode that not only keeps viewers guessing throughout the rest of the episode but gives a lot of insight into two of the characters that may inform their relationship going forward.

We also, yes, get to see more of the group of prisoners we last left on the Amazo, where they're at and what they're doing. Anatoli Knyazev makes a memorable appearance, as well as a pair of new characters who may be created just for Arrow. If they are existing DC Universe characters, they're seemingly fairly radically altered, including their names, but it seems likely we'll see more of at least one of them so perhaps we'll get a better sense for him soon. It's easy to see why Stephen Amell has this episode pegged as his favorite so far: it gives the actors a lot to do. There's almost no explicit dialogue in the present-day story; everything is done with silence, knowing looks and the absence of detail. In comic book art, Amell's, Manu Bennett's and Susannah Thompson's performances would be like an artist that does a lot with blacks and negative space. Thompson, though, is largely out of the loop. While she has plenty of unspoken tension with Oliver, she seems largely unaware of what's going on between her son and her house guest, meaning that it's really Amell and Bennett on whom the episode rests. Both acquit themselves nicely, but Bennett's Slade Wilson is so full to brimming with anger that it's difficult to say he's being subtle (in his defense, that's likely how he's supposed to be playing it). Amell gets to really show off a bit this episode and remind us why he got pegged as the kind of leading man that a few million people a week would want to tune in to see. And, yes, there's the scope. Without spoiling anything that's not already out there, there's a fight scene, and it's quite spectacular. They said that they had to build a hull and bow for The Amazo just for this episode, and you can see why; there would have been no convincing way to shoot around it on a set or to do it digitally on a TV budget. While the overall fight more colors the larger story than actually drives it, the end result promises a radically different rest of the season in a way that, even with all those spoilers released ahead of time, I didn't think to guess.