Control: Rewatching Arrow S1E2

I, Dalton Lewis, rewatched the second episode of Arrow this morning. In it a dock owner smuggles in drugs in connection with the Chinese Triads. Oliver Queen also manages to anger and offend everyone in his life. Laurel Lance can’t stand him. She is supposed to be the one but hasn’t done anything to deserve it. She is, however, a lawyer who fights for the little guy. She wants to represent the daughter of a murdered dockworker. She tries to explain in court that the corrupt man has to pay.

She is earnest and giving, and someone responds by trying to kill her. This has some strong parallels to the Batman trilogy of movies, but I like to think that it does its own spin on the story: Laurel Lance is stronger than Rachel Dawes. Rachel Dawes alternates between too moral and too prissy, but Laurel Lance strikes me as having more real integrity.

Oliver also pisses off his family again. They want him to take a leadership role in the company. Instead he pretends to be drunk and gives a rambling, Lex-esque speech in which he says how he will never be his father and how he will always be an entertaining failure of a man.

Oliver also makes John Diggle mad. Diggle doesn’t want to protect Oliver Queen if Oliver continues to run away from him and so forth. Diggle has also realized that Oliver is amazingly good in physical combat. He simply doesn’t want to be ignored and shunned and deemed unnecessary.

His little sister? Next on his “to offend” list. She notices countless burns and scars on Oliver’s body and is shocked and amazed. Oliver won’t tell her how he got them or anything. She shows him his grave site and tells a story about how she would talk to his gravestone and pretend that Oliver could listen.

Oliver, meanwhile, realizes that he needs to find some peace between himself and his loved ones — while pretending to be a playboy idiot. He and Diggle fight the Triads in an interesting action setpiece at Laurel’s apartment and then later at the docks.

I, Dalton Lewis, am a mentally ill fortysomething man, just rewatching television shows and movies that mean something to me. I sit here, thinking about someone who turns his life around and becomes someone, someone with effort and persistence, someone who makes something of himself. I want to do that with my writing. I want to be Oliver Queen and write novels about what is wrong with the world around me.

Thanks, and take care, friends.