Oliver sneaks into the interrogation room and begs Slade to reveal Thea’s location. It’s a great scene and gave Stephen Amell a chance to flex some of those acting chops he’s been working on since the show started. Gone is the steel faced, cold and distant Oliver, replaced by a very human, desperate, and downright terrified one. I thought this was Amell’s best performance yet, because we got to see sides of his character that are normally kept under the surface. Oliver is always so composed and ready for action that we hardly see him pace around a room or fidget uncontrollably. I felt that at any moment while surrounded by other people that he would just burst into a fit of rage, burst out a window and start interrogating anyone he could about Thea’s location. Instead, he keeps his cool, but the tension in each scene was palpable.
Slade is quickly released from police custody, but Felicity thinks she’s got a track on his car’s GPS. Diggle tries following by car, but is cut off and loses him. Sara hops on her motorcycle but finds that they’ve been chasing the wrong car, which prompts Roy to chase after him on foot. That doesn’t work either, and it’s immediately made clear that Slade is, again, one step ahead of them.
Slade then returns to Thea and shockingly tells her that she’s free to go. However, if she leaves, she’ll miss out on learning Oliver’s secret. We are led to believe that Slade will tell her about his nighttime hobby, but instead tells her (off screen) that Malcolm Merlyn is her father. We knew it wouldn’t be long before she found out that little nugget of information, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. Just as Oliver and Moira reconcile, Thea hates them both. This is one of Slade’s ways of hurting Oliver, not by killing Thea (which he could easily have done at any point), but by attacking his family’s relationships. He knows how important Oliver’s family is to him, so tearing that down at a personal level is a great move.
After facing Isabel at Queen Consolidated and learning of her new promotion to CEO, Oliver wrestles Thea’s location out of her. She warns him that Slade wants him to come alone, and without wanting to harm Thea’s safety, he agrees. What follows is another of Arrow’s fantastic fight sequences, with Oliver breaking into the warehouse and taking out some poor saps that Slade left there for him. What I liked about this sequence was the intensity at which Oliver takes the men out. He’s been trying hard this season to leave a smaller body count, but is seen here taking guys out left and right, viciously (and awesomely) breaking bones, and going so far as to stab some baddies with arrows, instead of shooting them at them. Unfortunately for Oliver, Thea’s already gone, though fortunately for Oliver, she’s made it safely to the precinct. Even though she tells them that Slade really was behind her abduction, Lance is arrested anyway. As I said, you just can’t get away with aiding and embedding mask-wearing, thug-killing vigilantes.