Arrow Recap: Season 5 Episode 14 “The Sin-Eater”

A trio of familiar faces brought mayhem to Arrow this week, reminding Oliver that choices have consequences – and not even he can escape them.

When it comes to grim and gritty™ superheroes, Arrow makes Zack Snyder’s Superman look like a boy scout. Our titular billionaire vigilante has spent four seasons killing, lying, and sowing fear and hostility throughout the city he allegedly wants to protect. By most moral standards and in most stories, he would be a villain.

That reality is at last catching up to Oliver Queen.

In “The Sin-Eater”, he gets one rude awakening after another. First, accompanied by Diggle, he follows up on last week’s Prometheus lead, stopping by the house of Justin Claybourne’s widow. Amanda Westfield seems mercifully normal (for lack of a better word), one of the few people who has managed to escape from the sinkhole of destruction that is Star City. Assuming his most mayor-like tone, Oliver asks for Prometheus’s name, and for an instant, the answer to a season-long mystery appears within reach.

No dice, though. Amanda refuses to give up her son, despite all the harm he’s done. He needs to be helped, she says, not imprisoned. In an uncommon show of restraint, Oliver doesn’t point out that the American justice system doesn’t work that way – not that he pays much heed to laws. He leaves, and we’re forced to wait some more. You didn’t really think it would be that easy, did you?

Meanwhile, other criminals need catching – again, in this case. China White, Carrie Cutter, and Liza Warner, all characters that have appeared on Arrow before, hijack a prison bus and return to Star City to wreak havoc. They want the thing that criminals on TV usually want: money. Tobias Church (an accomplice and eventual victim of Prometheus) left a $100 million stash somewhere, and the women intimidate various ruffians, including China’s former Triad associates, into revealing its location.

For Liza, their murder spree is personal as well. When Quentin confronts her during an arrest attempt, she reminds him that he worked for “one of the worst terrorists this city has ever seen”, Damian Darkh. Who is he to judge and condemn her? Sure, he was being blackmailed, but it’s not like Liza is committing crime for fun either. She’s trying to survive (namely, by getting the hell out of Star City), and if a few rules get broken along the way, at least she can live with it.

Speaking of which, Oliver’s night and day jobs keep colliding in not-so-productive ways. Susan passive-aggressively reveals that she knows his secret, asking him point-blank if he’s the Arrow. Oliver dismisses the idea (“I thought you were doing the joking thing”), and she seems to believe him. Later, however, he mentions the incident to Thea, who then mentions it to Felicity. They agree that Susan must be foiled, for the sake of the team; the fact that neither of them happens to like Oliver’s latest girlfriend goes unacknowledged.

Naturally, Felicity’s first instinct is to hack into Susan’s computer and erase the incriminating files. But once she sees the evidence, she realizes that Susan could simply obtain the documents from her source again; besides, as she said herself, nothing on the Internet ever truly goes away. They try another strategy: they leak “evidence” that Susan has a history of plagiarizing. This not only gets her fired, but it also ruins her credibility, preventing her from going public with her Arrow story.

Thea tells her furious brother that she and Felicity didn’t know what would happen, but that’s clearly a lie. Even in the Arrow universe, plagiarism is a serious offense, and, as Oliver observes later in the episode, Thea has more than a little Moira Queen in her. Thus, yet another Oliver Queen romantic relationship falls apart.

To make things worse, someone has leaked Detective Malone’s real autopsy report, which describes wounds consistent with the Green Arrow’s arrows, to the ACU. Oliver notices that the address on the file envelope belongs to Amanda Westfield; this must be Prometheus’s doing. Of course, that doesn’t matter to Captain Pike, who only cares that one of his officers was murdered.

Oliver explains to Pike his and Adrian’s “theory” that the Arrow was manipulated into killing Billy, hinting that, as mayor, he has been in contact with the vigilante. Why would someone who has spent years trying to help law enforcement kill a cop? Oliver’s argument ignores that many people have long viewed the Arrow as nothing more than a murderer, but his main point is clear: this guy does your job for you; maybe arresting him isn’t the greatest idea.

But no matter how it happened, Pike points out, the Arrow still technically caused Billy’s death. He’s going to have to live with that, Oliver responds.

Ultimately, Pike concedes. Team Arrow finds Liza, China White, and Cupid at a memorial, and we get a fight that’s stellar even for Arrow (props to the show for not scaling back action scenes when women are involved). It ends with the arrival of the ACU, who arrest the criminals.

Afterward, Oliver, dressed as the Arrow, apologizes to Pike for Billy. “It’s something I’m going to have to deal with for the rest of my life,” he says. Whether Pike gets the hint isn’t clear.

Things seem to calm down. Liza, China White, and Cupid are behind bars again. Oliver tentatively reconciles with Thea, sharing his concerns about her moral wellbeing. The ACU has agreed to lay off the Arrow. But then, the big bombshell lands: someone has leaked Oliver’s cover-up of Malone’s murder to the news media.

Oh, Oliver. You had to have known that choice would backfire. When will you learn?

In other news…

Dinah gets sworn in as an officer of the SCPD. This means she has to wear a disguise when she works with Team Arrow. Felicity offers her the Black Canary mask, and she accepts, despite her private doubts about whether she’s worthy of the mantle. The important thing is that her entrance during the climactic fight is a thing of beauty.

In the flashbacks, Oliver tries to get Anatoly out of the hospital, but Gregor and his henchmen trap them. The episode title comes from Anatoly’s description of Oliver: a person who takes the sins of others as his own. Which begs the question: who eats the sins of the sin-eater?

Best line

Oliver expressing his anger at Thea for ruining Susan’s career: “Who does that to a person?”

Arrow airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. EST on The CW.

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