Arrow season 3, episode 10, “Left Behind,” aired tonight. Read our recap and discuss the episode with fellow fans.
Three days later
The episode picks up three days after Oliver left for his duel with Ra’s al Ghul. Team Arrow continues to protect Starling City, with Diggle wearing the Arrow costume so the city doesn’t know the actual man is gone.
They manage to stop one crook after a high speed chase, but another gets away and returns to his boss, Danny Brickwell. Brickwell is a brick wall (rimshot), and he beats his escaped underling and leaves him to die.
Meanwhile, Team Arrow worries about Oliver’s fate. Felicity, though, is in denial. Oliver has come back from the dead before, so what makes this time any different?
Keeping the lights on
Felicity tracks down Brickwell’s name as the one in charge and does some detective work that brings Diggle and Arsenal to a warehouse, where they find the dead crook and burned evidence. They do find a partially unburnt paper with a list of numbers on it that they bring back to Felicity to decode.
When the trio heads down into the foundry, they find Malcolm Merlyn waiting for them. He’s looking for news on Oliver and tells them that if Oliver were alive, he would have contacted them by now.
Felicity, though, is still in denial, so she gets back to work on the numbers. As Diggle and Roy gently try to pull Felicity from her denial, Laurel arrives with an ID on their body, which ties back to Brickwell. They tell Laurel the situation, but Laurel, focusing on Felicity, says that they can’t believe Malcolm Merlyn.
Proof
Meanwhile, Malcolm heads to the sight of the duel, where he finds Ra’s’ sword. He brings it back to the foundry and tells the group that it is Ra’s’ custom to leave the instrument of death behind in honor of the deceased. The blood on the blade, he says, will belong to Oliver. He seems genuinely sorry, saying Oliver’s death means his own — “Good,” Felicity tells him.
The blood does indeed match Oliver’s, and Felicity leaves with the proof that she had been holding out for.
Later, Diggle realizes that the numbers on the paper they found are case numbers that correspond to criminals up for trial who were apprehended by Team Arrow.
Failed mission
At work, Felicity tearfully tells Ray that his mission to protect the city is a terrible idea and that it won’t bring Anna back — that she wouldn’t want it. Ray tells her not to tell him what Anna would have wanted, and Felicity leaves.
On her way out, Diggle and Roy call — they’ve realized Brickwell wants to destroy the evidence in all these cases to get them thrown out of court. It would ruin everything Oliver and Team Arrow have been working for, so Felicity returns to the foundry.
Brickwell’s men hijack a truck and attempt to steal the evidence from a warehouse, but Diggle and Arsenal arrive to stop them. They’re outnumbered, though, and Diggle is heavily outmatched by Brickwell himself, though one of Arsenal’s arrows saves his life. However, Brickwell and his men get away with the evidence — which Felicity reveals she allowed to happen because she couldn’t bear to lose any more friends. She then quits Team Arrow.
Her next stop is to apologize to Ray. She tells him she’s recently lost someone close to her and that another friend died only three months earlier; she’s past her quota for losing friends, so if Ray wants to go out and commit suicide with his quest, she won’t stop him, but she also won’t help him.
The justice you can’t outrun
Back in the foundry, Laurel arrives and Diggle tells her the truth. He feels guilty about not being able to protect Oliver, and Laurel comforts him. After he leaves, not knowing what comes next, Laurel finds Sara’s Canary gear laid out.
Thea returns home to find Malcolm waiting for her. He tells her that they need to leave Starling City and never return.
Elsewhere, all the men whose cases were thrown out because of missing evidence meet Brickwell, who forces them to join his crew. They’re going to take over the Glades. After the meeting, two of the men are confronted by Laurel dressed as Black Canary.
Meanwhile, a figure cloaked in black finds Oliver’s body and brings him to a cabin where he asks for help. As the episode closes, Oliver wakes up and finds Tatsu and Maseo tending to him.
Meanwhile, in Hong Kong…
Maseo and Oliver are concerned about getting Tatsu back, but Amanda Waller has other priorities — namely, recovering the Omega vial from China White. Maseo knows that Waller won’t help, though, so when the pair are pinned down by China White’s men during a mission and Oliver has the chance to kill one of China White’s men, he hesitates.
During their debrief, Waller berates Oliver for not killing the man, but Maseo knows Oliver let the man go. Oliver reveals that he put a GPS tracker on the man so he could lead them back to China White — and therefore, Tatsu — putting Maseo in Oliver’s debt.
