After the shocking death of Sara, it looks as though Oliver and the gang are desperate to find out whodunnit. But will they find her murderer and bring them to justice?
There’s quite a few bombshells dropped in The Magician. It picks up right from last time, with Nyssa going quickly from grieved to vengeful and determined to find out who killed Sara. To make matters worse, it turns out Malcolm Merlyn is back in Starling City. Oliver himself has to deal with the knowledge that Merlyn is alive, but also remain level-headed enough to get answers before killing him; something no one else seems overtly inclined to do. In flashback land, we see Oliver completing his first kill mission, as well as learning something ground-breaking.
The Magician is a good episode. True, the whodunit plot is starting to wear a little thin with all the archer characters turning up on the scene (and more on the way), but it’s entertaining nonetheless. We get a pretty sweet three-way fight between Oliver, Nyssa and Malcolm which alone makes up for the constant appearance of archery based characters. The fact that they all wear hoods will probably get confusing before long.
Thea seems to be taking the hypocrite route, opting to not let on to Oliver that she knows Malcolm is alive and has in fact been teaching her. Suffice to say it leads to a couple of jarring moments wherein which she doesn’t put her new skills to use. Given that Nyssa doesn’t know about them, and no one else was there to see it there was no reason not to. It also appears that she doesn’t know Oliver is the Arrow. Why do I get the feeling that eventually they will fight and she will probably die for drama’s sake?
Felicity is away for this episode, as she is visiting Barry in Central City. Diggle and Roy take a back seat too, the latter due to being tranqulised and thus not able to take part in the afore-mentioned fight, which is a shame because that would have been fantastic. Laurel gets a bit of interaction with Nyssa, as well as helping to track down Malcolm and inadvertently setting Nyssa on Thea to flush Merlyn out.
Speaking of Nyssa, she confuses me. In season 2, she was more than willing to kill Sara when she refused to come back to the League of Assassins with her. Cut to the finale episode where she was happy to take her away from her loving family who’d thought her dead for 5 years. That doesn’t sound like love to me, it seemed more like Sara was her pet and her grief here comes across as incredibly corny. That is likely due to her acting like she and Laurel have lost the same thing, and noticing her with Sara’s jacket saying “You are unfit to wear it.”
The revelation bought about in the flashbacks is the only real draw of it. More and more this season, I find the flashbacks more distracting from the main story line. Indeed, they seem to be taking up less time this season. Finding out though, that the events of season 1/2 were indirectly cause by Amanda Waller puts the entirety of the first two seasons in a new context. It also raises several questions about how absolutely no one in this show has killed her before she kills everyone. This also means that Deathstroke will probably be put in the Suicide Squad at some point, as he was last seen in a prison on the island where A.R.G.U.S was operating.
It’s nice to see Malcolm Merlyn getting a chance to explain himself for once. The man has killed over 502 people, but somehow there’s still a sympathetic side to him that makes you want to see him survive Nyssa’s attempts at offing him. The fact that he easily flank’s Oliver’s attempts to track him is impressive, if he didn’t then meet with him in a public place with absolutely no one recognizing him.
As the final cherry on the cake, we finally meet the man himself: Ra’s al Ghul. It’s a brief scene, but he declares war on Oliver so there’s always that. As an aside, as fun as it would have been to have Liam Neeson return to this role, it probably wouldn’t have worked as they do seem to be playing up the more mystical side of things here.
With all the suspects turning up in Starling City, who do you think killed Sara? Do you think Deathstroke will be turning up anytime soon? Let us know in the comments below…
