Arrow "Nanda Parbat" Review: What You Can't Refuse

Arrow S03E15: "Nanda Parbat"

After Arrow's fall finale, TV.com user @stevei called me "clueless"—which is among the nicer things people have said about me lately—because I didn't think Ra's was testing Oliver in an effort to determine whether Ollie was League of Assassins material. Ra's clearly wasn't buying the whole "I killed Sara!" thing that Oliver was selling, and given how he treated Oliver in that episode, it seemed an unlikely outcome. But here we are, six episodes later, and @stevei's mostly right, though a Lazarus Pit was not involved: Ra's wants Oliver to be the new Demon's Head.

Those who are familiar with Ra's will recall that one of the long-living assassin's fixations is finding someone to be his heir. In the comics, it's typically Batman, a man who Ra's deeply respects despite their methodological and ideological differences, and who also happens to be his daughter Talia's beloved. It's a nice set of circumstances in which one could easily say, "Yes, Ra's, I do see why you would choose the Batman as your heir. He's totally willing to do what must be done—apart from the 'killing people' thing—and he's a master planner and thinker with the ability to see the big picture. Yeah, I'd want that guy to take over my life's work, too."

But Arrow's Oliver Queen is not Batman, no matter how much the show would like me to believe he is.

I'm sure that Ra's will lay out his reasons for selecting Oliver for such an esteemed position—and I say "selecting" because Ra's al Ghul does not "offer" things; you do what he says or you make him very angry... when the next episode airs. But until then (and like I said to @stevei back in December), he doesn't currently have much of a reason to name Oliver as his successor. After all, Oliver didn't even really survive that duel with Ra's; Maseo dragged him to Tatsu's Hut of Magical Herbal Healing, and they revived and healed Oliver from what was apparently a mostly dead state of being. Oliver has a mission, and he kind of has a code by which he executes that mission, but it's also an occasionally flexible code, and Ra's doesn't strike me as particularly flexible.

Of course, I'm probably putting the cart before the horse. It's not like Ra's would just announce his retirement the very moment Oliver agreed to follow in his footsteps, should that be what comes to pass. There would likely be training, grooming, and all this other stuff to groom Oliver into a respectable figurehead for the League and its mission, whatever that mission is apart from assassinating people. What Ra's likely sees in Oliver, I guess, is potential. Oliver is someone Ra's can break down and then rebuild however he likes, using the power of the League as a way to entice Oliver to accept. This is an especially important detail since Nyssa's love of Sara has apparently completely disqualified her for the job, despite the fact that she's obviously a significantly better candidate. I'm sure Nyssa will be thrilled when she hears the news. Just thrilled.

While it comes off as sort of implausible that Ra's would settle on Oliver, it does at least lessen my past critique about Ra's being a terrible Big Bad with poorly defined, transferred motivations for wanting to wreak havoc in Oliver's life. Now Ra's is an obstacle that poses a different sort of challenge, one that will force Oliver to consider what he could do as the leader of the League. There's potential for this storyline to provide a very interesting endgame for the season's bigger concerns. Whereas Season 1 presented Malcolm as a distorted reflection of Oliver and Season 2 had Slade pushing Oliver to go back to being the killer Slade believed him to be, this not-really-an-offer offer from Ra's can shift Oliver's focus to the question of what being the Arrow is costing him. Oliver has almost totally surrendered the idea of being Oliver Queen, heir to a once-thriving-but-now-renamed business and a guy who could clean up the city that way, in order to concentrate on being the Arrow and saving the city while wearing a hood.

The League represents an extreme version of that impulse. It's a large-scale organization that could, if properly supervised, do real good, much like Queen Consolidated could've done under Oliver's guidance (even if he wasn't qualified for it, as is the case when it comes to Oliver running the League). Arrow's two previous Big Bads employed action and violence to push Oliver to clarify and hone his own sense of what's right and what's wrong, but now Ra's is cutting right to the core of just how committed Oliver thinks he can or should be to the Arrow identity, and without even threatening Starling City. Yet, anyway.

So, yes, Arrow has set up a potentially interesting existential dilemma for Oliver, and I'm cautiously intrigued by it. However, the backbending required to get Oliver into Nanda Parbat so the dilemma could be created was not all that graceful. The League's capture of Malcolm solved all the show's problems up to that point; if Ra's kills Malcolm, his feud with Oliver and Thea could be forgotten because Malcolm, in Oliver's estimation, wouldn't rat on Thea to save his own skin. Life would go on... for everyone except Malcolm, who'd be dead.

But, no, Oliver decided that Thea didn't know what she was doing when she tipped off the League, and thus he needed to make sure that Thea didn't have to live with the guilt of killing someone (else). The situation served as another installment of my least favorite show-within-a-show, Oliver Knows What's Best for the Women in His Life, and "Nanda Parbat" managed to affirm Oliver's righteousness while also adding another layer of motivation to it. Thea did seem to realize the consequences of her actions after Roy took her to visit the family of the cop he killed, something he does from time to time to remind himself of his mirakuru-infused murder. So, to deal with the guilt that Oliver feared would destroy her soul, she decided to let Nyssa out of her cage and handed the assassin a big old sword with which to kill her. It was an interesting emotional arc for Thea, albeit a rushed one, as the episode's ultimate goal wasn't so much about Thea's decision as it was about getting us to Ra's's offer.

The extra bit of motivation for saving Malcolm was Oliver's raging ego. He just couldn't deal with the fact that there was someone out there better than he was... as long as we're ignoring the fact that needing Malcolm to train him sort of acknowledges that Malcolm is better than Oliver, at least when it comes to conceiving a plan for dealing with Ra's al Ghul. I liked this scenario a bit more than Oliver being right about Thea because we got to see Oliver admit that he's an egotistical jerk. He so rarely owns up to these sort of faults, especially without hedging them in flimsy justifications. Diggle provided those justifications this week, but, hey, at least Diggle actually got to do something other than stand next to Felicity's computer.

Speaking of Felicity, she was once again stuck trying to prevent Ray from becoming Oliver—no small feat, as Ray had holed up in his condo for a week to finish the A.T.O.M. suit and hadn't come into the office at all. That totally seems like something Oliver would do—and given that Oliver lost control of Queen Consolidated, is something he more or less did. While Felicity made some progress in getting Ray to eat, shower, and sleep, they also ended up sleeping together, and as we all know, when you wake up after having sex, you immediately know exactly what you need to do to make your combat exosuit function correctly. Which is what happened with Ray, and he went off flying around Starling City.

I won't rehash the whole "Ray and Oliver as foils" thing, but "Nanda Parbat" continued to drive it all home. Ray focused very narrowly on his vigilante activities at the expense of his business and, arguably, his non-combat exosuit plans to save Starling City through a rebranding effort. Meanwhile, Oliver was presented with a very big-picture offer that would push him further away from being Oliver Queen. They both stand at a crossroads regarding the type of life they each want to live, and now they must both make very big decisions.

FROM THE QUIVER

– Thea and Laurel were awesome again this week. Thea just went and told Laurel that she killed Sara because she hates secrets—they're what drove her to Malcolm in the first place—and then Laurel behaved far more reasonably than I expected her to. Going after Malcolm, however, was exactly what I expected, and ended as it should have. Laurel's chat with Nyssa about Sara was also top-notch stuff.

– Flashbacks revealed Oliver escaping a shootout with Aiko in tow, which hopefully means there's a flashback with just the two of them in our future. I can get on board with that.

– This episode was directed by Gregory Smith, the same Gregory Smith who starred on Everwood and can be seen on Rookie Blue.

– I really thought that Diggle was going to die in this episode. He was having moments with Baby Sara and Lyla and he was signing up for this harebrained mission. That's generally TV structuring for "We are going to kill this character." He's safe... for now!

– Arrow's League of Assassins has remained rather mysterious regarding whether or not it carries out some other aspects typically associated with the organization. Malcolm's apparently misguided decision to destroy the Glades would indicate that this League isn't all that different from previous incarnations, but we haven't received any solid confirmation yet.

– "I hate boats."

– Arrow's off for the next two weeks, so I'll see you all on Wednesday, March 18.

What did you think of "Nanda Parbat"?