Arrow: Easter Eggs and DC Comics References in "Deathstroke"
This week, we were actually fairly light on the DC Comics Easter eggs relative to most episodes [...]
This week, we were actually fairly light on the DC Comics Easter eggs relative to most episodes of Arrow. (Perhaps they're saving up for "The Man Under the Hood," the Flash-themed episode that features Cisco "Vibe" Ramon and Caitlin "Killer Frost" Snow and which airs four days before Easter.) There was a ton going on, though, and it seems likely they just didn't have space in the episode to do a bunch of winks and nods. That said, there were a few things we spotted...
Roy takes off The number of times Roy Harper and Oliver Queen have "broken up" in the comics is probably second only to the number of times Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson have done it. Seeing him take off after his little scuffle with Team Arrow was about as surprising as if Oliver lost control of the company... ...oh, wait...!
"He got struck by lightning" When Roy wonders whether telling Thea the truth about Team Arrow would have been a better solution than fooling her into breaking it off with him, he asks what's the worst that could happen. Felicity's response? That after she told somebody Oliver's secret, he was struck by lightning. She does admit that's statistically unlikely to be repeated, though... The guy in question? Barry Allen, who will become The Flash this fall in his own spinoff pilot.
The KGB(east) Anatoli Knyazev is The KGBeast in the comics, a former KGB agent who becomes an assassin-for-hire. We get a bit of a wink-and-a-nod to his backstory here, as the character makes his first overt reference to the KGB in the series while he's trying to deactivate the landmine. Whether we'll see him become the KGBeast is way up in the air; so far, he's been a pretty good guy, at least as far as crime bosses go, and there's been little indication that he might go the crazed metahuman route.
"The sins of the father" There are an awful lot of people who had speculated since her first appearance that Isabel Rochev would be some major Green Arrow villain or ally operating under an assumed name. Some thought she might be Talia, the daughter of Ra's al Ghul. I never bought it; after all, she's a character who exists in the comics, and she's got a fine enough motivation as it stands. In the comics, Rochev (whose name appears on Robert Queen's list in the show) comes from a Siberian village, where she worked in a diamond mine. Inspired by Robert Queen, she used him as a model to build herself up from nothing. After Queen's death, she managed to become the CEO of Queen Industries through more or less exactly the means she attempted to use at the start of the season -- buying up smaller shares through shell companies until she became a major stockholder. In the comics, she resents Oliver for being a disgrace to the Queen family name and hopes to bring the company back from the brink. Will they do something similar here? Maybe, maybe not. Certainly there's something going on between Rochev and Oliver's father, and it's distinctly possible that we could see a variation on that story...perhaps (given how little Moira cares for her) including an affair with Robert before his death. Following the destruction in Star City that took place as a result of the Justice League: Cry for Justice storyline, Rochev started to provide her own personal private security forces to Star City, marketing it primarily to the corrupt bureaucrats of the city, who were struggling to hang onto the city after hundreds were left homeless. That's not entirely too far off from the situation in the Glades, is it? Following the earthquake, part of the reason Sebastian Blood has managed to capture the public imagination so effectively has to do with the fact that "the 99%" still haven't actually been made whole, while the rich and powerful people responsible for the destruction in Starling City continue to get away with it (most notably, Moira). Moira is, in fact, more or less emblematic of exactly the kind of person Oliver was going after last season. The repeated dialogue This one's not the same kind of Easter egg we usually look at, but it's interesting to see "He's not the man you think he is" applied to both Sebastian Blood (during the debate) and Oliver Queen in the movie. We see variations on the "You're scary" line delivered by Oliver to Isabel and then by Anatoli to Sara on the island. And of course the "my own worst enemy" monologue delivered by Moira and then Oliver shortly thereafter. Kate Spencer: The anti-Manhunter Kate Spencer has become the official voice of the stodgy Establishment at the district attorney's office in this show, which is interesting considering that in the comics she's Manhunter, somebody who has lost faith in the system and becomes a brutal vigilante in her own right.
