Arrow "Corto Maltese" Review: Thea MIA

Arrow S03E03: "Corto Maltese"

It's sort of wild, how thoroughly Arrow has managed to rehabilitate Thea as a character. In Season 1, she was mostly a party girl in need of attention from her family; there just wasn't a lot there for the writers to craft stories around, or for Willa Holland to really do anything with. Thankfully, she had a bit more to do in Season 2, as she came to grips with Moira's role in the Undertaking, enjoyed a supportive relationship with Roy, and managed to successfully run Verdant following Tommy's death.

It was all well and good seeing Thea go through all of that. Moira's incarceration took its toll, but it ended up bringing the two of them closer together. Thea was never threatened by Roy spending time with Sin, and she even became friendly with the young woman. In short, Thea had evolved into a well-adjusted individual on a show whose characters generally aren't particularly well-adjusted. And then Arrow decided it was time to break her.

Learning the truth about Malcolm being her father sent Thea into a tailspin. The people she knew to be her family had lied in order to protect her, a decision that was at odds with her new, more confident state of mind. It was coddling and condescending, and it signaled to Thea that Oliver and Moira both thought her too weak to handle the truth. Moira's death at the hands of Slade—which occurred because Oliver wasn't honest about everything that happened while he was gone—only added insult to injury, and it was followed by another round of of hurt as Roy continued to put himself in danger by going along with the Arrow's Starling City protection schemes.

"Corto Maltese" introduced Thea 3.0 (or would that be Mia 1.0? Either way, a nice nod to another Green Arrow character). After some pain training and beatings-as-training at Malcolm's hand, the Thea whom Oliver and Roy found on Corto Maltese had been transformed into a different version of the confident Thea we knew in Season 2. She has secrets of her own now, and the training to not suffer the pain life brings. That's the reason she got into Malcolm's limo. It wasn't because she trusted him to not lie to her despite his assurances to the contrary, but because she believed she could learn to not feel the hurt she experienced at the end of last season—or, at the very least, to perhaps channel that hurt into something resembling protection from future pain. If Malcolm could do it to destroy the Glades, then Thea could at least do it to keep herself emotionally safe.

What I sort of loved about all things Thea-related in "Corto Maltese" was that Oliver was still acting selfishly. His desire for Thea to return to Starling City was mostly about bringing her back so that he'd have someone in his life who wasn't connected to him as the Arrow. So that he'd have a reason to leave the Arrow Cave. So that he wouldn't die down there. He may justify it by insisting that they need to be a family, that this will help her heal, but they'll still be a family built on secrets and lies. Except that this time, Thea's not completely powerless, even if Oliver has been lying to here and continues to lie to her with "pathological sincerity."

Sure, their situation may be all sorts of messed-up in the way that families tend to be messed-up on TV melodramas, but there are still elements of love between them. There's also the longing to trust again, which is why that scene where Oliver told Thea about Robert's suicide worked as well as did. Amell's gotten so good at Oliver's "I'm talking about painful stuff that I'm still not able to deal with" voice and facial expressions; it's the best part of his performance, and it came through in spades here. Meanwhile, Holland didn't shy away from Thea's anger and general skepticism with regard to Oliver's character, but she was quick to show that Thea is still clinging to the Queen family, even as she's able to duel with Malcolm. There's a complicated web of emotions and motivations being spun here, and Arrow is deftly handling it.

Less deft were Laurel's attempts to deal with the pain she feels in the wake of Sara's death. I don't mean "less deft" from the show's perspective, though Laurel's reason for being at the Wildcat gym felt like a halfhearted effort to push her into the Ted Grant's (J.R. Ramirez) orbit. Instead, I mean "less deft" in terms of the actions Laurel took to try and work through the loss, which resulted in her getting beaten up and hospitalized. Her first time out was never going to go well, especially since it was motivated less by an actual plan and more by the urge to do something. Like firing an empty gun at Lacroix last week, it was another wake-up call in a long line of them for Laurel. Eventually, she'll figure out what she needs to do to come to terms with Sara being dead.

I like that Laurel is entering this tunnel of pain and training at the same time that Thea is coming out of it and returning to Starling City. Both women are on similar paths; they're trying to deal with their respective pain and to figure out who they are as a result of their losses, so Arrow is setting up something of a parallel track for the two characters. It's rather exciting to see the show start to develop these sorts of structures and then apply them to characters who aren't Oliver.

FROM THE QUIVER

– I can only assume that A.R.G.U.S. paid for the trip to Corto Maltese and will also be covering all the damage that Oliver did to the hotel room. Related: No one thought to ask how Thea was paying for a sweet villa while working at a cafe?

– I didn't find the (man)hunt for Mark Shaw all that interesting, though I did enjoy this week's action sequences a good deal. Mostly, it just felt like groundwork for whatever the writers have planned for A.R.G.U.S. and maybe whenever Diggle gets around to doing something about H.I.V.E. Remember that?

– Felicity didn't have much to do this week apart from unearthing some weapons technology that Queen Consolidated's Applied Sciences division had been developing and catching up on the latest news on the Streak news, which paved the way for her visit to The Flash next week. Man, is she going to be annoyed that Oliver didn't tell her that Barry woke up from his coma.

– I would've liked to see some juicier flashbacks in "Corto Maltese," but I'm hoping we'll get more revealing ones as the season progresses. I did appreciate the gauzy look they had this week, and the way that in the close-ups, half of the frame was just slightly out of focus. It made them feel more like recalled memories, and it was an interesting departure from the color saturation Arrow typically uses to signal Oliver's flashbacks.

– Even though it was a character point that the show quickly dropped, I liked that Laurel went after a man who was abusing his girlfriend. It recalled our introduction to Sara as a protector and avenger of women.

– "What is with your family and islands?"

– "Are we favor friends now? ...Are we friends?"

– "I never said I didn't know how to use a gun." I appreciated how light and casual Amell's line delivery was on that.

– So unless she's playing a long game, I think we can cross Nyssa off the suspect list, yeah?

What did you think of "Corto Maltese"?