‘Arrow’ Season 5 Premiere: Oliver’s Promise to Laurel Is Revealed

Team Arrow seeks new members as Oliver juggles being a vigilante with being Mayor of Star City

Arrow Season 5 Premiere
The CW

(Spoiler alert: Do not read on if you have not watched Wednesday’s Season 5 premiere episode of “Arrow.”)

With the defeat of Damien Darhk and the exit of basically every member of Team “Arrow,” Oliver and Felicity are feeling a little short-handed in the Season 5 premiere.

The first episode of the new season of the CW superhero drama sees Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) trying on a new moniker: Mr. Mayor. After being sworn in during the Season 4 finale, Mayor Queen, we return to find, is not exactly fulfilling all his new duties satisfactorily.

Basically, this is because he’s all on his own in crime-fighting since Laurel (Katie Cassidy) died, Diggle (David Ramsey) is gone, Thea (Willa Holland) refuses to put a cape back on.

Felicity thinks it’s time to recruit new vigilantes to join Team Arrow, but Oliver is still hesitant, though he may not have a choice when he — as the Mayor — gets kidnapped by new baddies in town, led by Tobias Church (Chad Coleman).

In flashbacks, Oliver lands in Russia and immediately learns the hard way how to break his own thumbs to free himself from handcuffs — just in time to use it in the present to not only turn the tables on his guard, but snap his neck as well.

When Thea, back in Speedy garb to save her brother, confronts Oliver about the murder — something he had long pledged to never do again — he defends putting killing back on the table. After all, if he had killed Darhk earlier, like he had multiple opportunities to do, Laurel would still be alive.

Oliver is reluctant to recruit new vigilantes for Team Arrow, but a flashback to Laurel’s deathbed reveals that she, too, would have wanted him to do just that. “Don’t let me be the last Canary,” she tells him, and a video call with the overseas Diggle finally convinces him to do just that.

Naming four police officers on the Star City Police Department members of the newly formed Anti-Crime Unit, Oliver also agrees to recruit a vigilante who goes by the name Wild Dog, as well as Felicity’s Felicity, Curtis Holt (Echo Kellum), who DC comic book fans know by the alter-ego Mr. Terrific.

The new Team Arrow seems to finally be coming together, and just in time, too, as one of the newly minted Anti-Crime Unit police officers is brutally attacked by a new villain, a hooded, masked figure who wields a bow and arrow, who is most definitely not the Green Arrow.

“Arrow” airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET on The CW.

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