Arrow Season 1 Episode 5: “Damaged”

I’ve finally gotten a chance to catch up on everything I’ve missed in Arrow! Aren’t DVRs amazing? This episode starts out with Oliver on trial for being the archer vigilante. And who does Oliver choose to be his lawyer? None other than Laurel, his ex-girlfriend whose father happens to be the lead detective on the case and blames him for the death of his other daughter.  That sounds like a great idea.

This episode is pretty funny to me, in the sense that Oliver  is so calm during the whole proceedings. I mean, he is the vigilante and everyone is convinced he is but he couldn’t care any less. He’s also plotting to take down a European weapons dealer at the same time.

How does he do it?

Oliver is much smarter than everyone gives him credit for, helping Laurel build a partially true defense that he is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from his time on the island as well as revealing that he was tortured by what appears to be Deathstroke the Terminator (whose costume doesn’t look as good as I was hoping) as well as him being too inept to do be a vigilante.

He better give Laurel a nice thank you gift, as the combination of his bodyguard Diggle posing as the archer while he was in court and him being able to beat a lie detector test with her defense gets him off the hook. There’s an odd scene at the end where Laurel insinuates that she knows he is the vigilante, but I don’t know if it was just me.

On the Queen family front, relationships between Moira and stepfather Walter keeps getting strained, as he wonders about all the shady activities she has been involved with of late.