TV – Arrow Season 4, Episode 5

Steve Taylor-Bryant joins Team Arrow in the hunt for Sara (any excuse to follow Caity Lotz) but does this week’s episode leave him feeling Haunted?...

You watch yourself on that one, mate. He'll make what you saw in the other realm look like a bloody gnat.

A waitress is attacked by two thugs when she is rescued by Sara, who then proceeds to try and kill the waitress as well before the police show up and she flees. Oliver’s new political strategist suggests that, for the good of his campaign, he distances himself from Laurel Lance and his past scandals and in the first flashback Conklin tries to explain to Baron Reiter that he thinks Oliver is a spy but Reiter has found his own spy – John Constantine. Captain Lance is now sure that his escaped and possessed daughter is responsible for the spate of killings and Felicity asks Curtis to clean up Ray Palmer’s last message as she thinks there is another message underneath the recording she heard. Damien Darhk is back to his bad ways and requests that Lance plugs a device into a nearby server farm and Thea, being worried her brother will kick his friends to the kerb for his campaign, is interrupted by reports of a crazy blonde woman attacking people in a nightclub.

Canary gets to the venue first to try and stop Sara and Green Arrow gets his first look at the woman and is shocked that it is Sara. After Sara flees, Oliver demands to know what happened and realises that Laurel and Thea used the Lazarus Pit. In a flashback Constantine asks Oliver if he knows where this particular place on a map is and, when Oliver says he does, Constantine escapes custody and takes Oliver hostage. Lance and Oliver let each other know that they now know about Sara and Felicity finds out that the gadget that Darhk gave to Lance is a virus. Oliver wants Lance to have back up and sends him to ask Diggle, who isn’t happy that Lance is working with Darhk but a bit more forgiving when Lance explains why. Oliver and Felicity are talking about Oliver’s past, Ray’s message and death and grieving in general when they realise that it is Thea that Sara is hunting.

Sara breaks into Thea’s apartment and tries to kill her but Thea manages to escape and hide so Sara runs. In the hospital Thea explains that she still has the bloodlust and it's Malcolm’s fault for stitching her up when they went to Nanda Parbat which Oliver blames Laurel for and Laurel argues back about hypocrisy and the like on Oliver’s part. In another flashback, Constantine and Oliver arrive at the place on the map and, after a little bit of magic, discover something underground. Diggle and Lance plant the device for Darhk and John realises it's deleting files and catches a glimpse of his brother’s name. Alarms go off so Lance coshes Diggle with his gun and pretends to security that he is arresting a hacker so they can escape. Back at the hospital Sara is chanting around Thea’s bed but is disturbed and escapes through a window with Thea still alive.

Thea convinces Team Arrow to use her as bait in a Sara trap and goes to the old nightclub the Queens owned. Sara turns up to kill Thea as predicted but Oliver shoots her with a tranquiliser arrow and stops Laurel from killing her, saying that he thinks her soul can be returned and proceeds to phone his old friend John Constantine. Lance joins the Team in the ArrowCave as Constantine starts his process to take himself, Oliver and Laurel to another realm to rescue Sara’s soul. In the other realm Oliver and Laurel in their vigilante garb fight off the monsters in the Lazarus Pit to rescue Sara whilst Constantine fights off the guards and they return to reality with Sara’s soul restored. A flashback sees Oliver save Constantine from a death trap as he takes the magical Orb of Horace from its resting place before giving a trinket to Oliver to return to Baron Reiter with and punches Oliver to make it look like he escaped. Oliver prepares for his campaign Q&A with Laurel in attendance much to his Political Strategists disgust, Lance gives Diggle his brother’s file that show he was a nasty dude and Curtis, hopped up on energy drinks, plays Felicity Ray’s hidden message which states he’s alive and in trouble.

What Arrow has done well over the years is restore things. It has restored our favourite comic book characters to the screen, taken the likes of The Flash and now Legends of Tomorrow and introduced them to an expectant audience whilst still building its own, restored Thea, restored Sara, made people see John Barrowman as something other than Captain Jack and, this week, has taken a dead television show from a different network and restored its main character, John Constantine. I haven’t yet watched Constantine due to time issues and so wasn’t as hurt as other fans when the show was cancelled. I didn’t get why people were that bothered, as I didn’t know much about it but, after watching Matt Ryan as John Constantine this week, I am definitely going to binge watch the series. He was hilarious, brooding and so very watchable and played off Stephen Amell better than most actors have and that is a high compliment indeed. Whether there will be more of John Constantine in Arrow in the future is as yet unknown (but probably) and whether he turns up in the other CW shows is still to be decided by the powers that be but I really hope so, as he managed to take my focus off Caity Lotz this week and that really does require a lot of magic.

Image - CW.