Arrow season 5, episode 4, “Penance,” saw Oliver and Lyla trying to break Diggle out of prison while Tobias Church made his move in Star City.

After being broken out of prison despite his desire to be left there, Diggle tells Oliver not to change. And I found myself scratching my head a bit. Diggle has no agency in this arc, which is something that gets under my skin. And the chief perpetrator of that is, of course, Oliver.

He tells Lyla that he wants to be left in prison to atone for not only killing Andy (which I think most would agree was a necessary evil) but also trusting him despite Oliver’s warnings — which directly led to Laurel’s death. He feels like he has more than one life on his conscience. Additionally, breaking out of military prison would make him a fugitive, which isn’t particularly conducive to raising a child.

So, Diggle wants to be left to serve his sentence. Lyla and Oliver decide he needs to be broken out so he can serve his penance as Spartan rather than behind bars. Felicity objects because she respects Diggle’s agency, so she gets left behind. (The significance of a woman is standing up for a POC’s agency is not lost on me.) Oh, and Oliver takes down his team when they try to stop him from going. But somehow Oliver is in the right.

While narratively it makes sense for Diggle to leave prison and return to the team, I feel like there were ways to show Diggle taking things too far, making an intervention from Lyla and Oliver necessary.

As is, we only have the one visit from Lyla before they’re planning a prison break. While the end would have been the same, I would have liked to have, for instance, seen Oliver visit Diggle. Perhaps we could have seen more of Diggle in his cell, torturing himself. Or him having issues with other prisoners. There are countless more options that might have softened the blow of essentially blackmailing Diggle into becoming a fugitive.

As much as I’m looking forward to seeing Oliver help Diggle crawl out of the darkness the way Diggle helped Oliver back in season 1, it would have been nice if it hadn’t started off on the Self-Righteous Oliver Is Always RightTM foot. And ending with Diggle acknowledging that Oliver was right to reject his agency doesn’t feel right. It could have been interesting to see Diggle unhappy with being forced to escape prison and having to come to terms with his new way of life.

I guess, in the end, what I’m looking for is just some acknowledgment that Oliver continues to make decisions for other people and that isn’t right.

Meanwhile, while Oliver is suffering from gout breaking Diggle out of prison, Tobias Church makes his move; one of his men is caught stealing some basic tech from Kord Industries. It turns out that he was always meant to be caught and the stolen tech was always meant to end up in evidence lockup because it was rigged to blow. Quentin and D.A. Chase are there when the bomb goes off and Tobias’ men arrive to steal a bunch of confiscated weaponry. They’re lucky to escape the situation alive.

Their plan for these weapons is to take out the Anti-Crime Unit. They launch an all-out assault on the building while Chase is interrogating Church’s captured man, and the few assuredly clean cops and the D.A. would be dead if not for the remaining members of Oliver’s team, who help the cops and D.A. escape. However, Curtis is injured in the process and Rene gives himself up as a distraction so Evelyn and Rory can get Curtis to safety.

So, Rene, who has been struggling to play well with others, gives himself up, likely thinking he’ll be killed, for the sake of his teammates. In doing so, he proves himself worthy of the title hero. Tobias, however, is smart and recognizes the value of keeping Rene alive because he has information about the Green Arrow. So he’s going to torture Rene and find out what he needs to know to take over the city.

Oliver returns to town just in time to find out Rene has been taken captive and promises that they’ll find him.

Meanwhile, in the flashbacks, Oliver takes his third Bratva test: he has to get information from a man in a Russian jail then kill him. Oliver is unhappy about doing it since the man doesn’t seem like a real threat, but he does what he’s told and officially becomes a member of the Bratva. Oliver snapping this man’s neck definitely looks close to the dangerous nature of the man who is rescued from Lian Yu in the pilot — not quite, but almost.

Other odds and ends

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What did you think of ‘Arrow’ 5×04 ‘Penance’?