Soooo Oliver as mayor might not have been the best idea after all.
Turns out bad guys have a tendency to kidnap the mayor in an effort to draw out the Green Arrow, so it's a sticky situation when the mayor and the Green Arrow are one in the same.
That's what happened during tonight's season five premiere, when Oliver was attacked during a ceremony meant to honor Laurel with a new statue. Some evil dude named Church wanted to take the Arrow down, and had no clue that he already had him.
At one point, Mayor Ollie was zip tied to a chair and was being tortured by a cop. Oliver quickly got out of his zip ties and had an epic chair fight with his attacker, before killing him, in order to protect his secret. The scene felt delightfully old school Arrow, but there was so much more to come.
With some encouragement from everyone, including Lance (who was not in good shape after his daughter's death) and the dead Laurel, Oliver finally begrudgingly agreed to work with a few people, even if he didn't want to call them a team. When his small group of cops ended up doing a pretty good job rescuing the other hostages from Church, Mayor Queen officially designated them the new anti-crime unit, meant to take down crime in and out of the police department.
Unfortunately, that anti-crime unit might not be long for this world. One of the cops was attacked and killed on his way home by a new guy with a bow, an arrow, and a very frightening mask.
Meanwhile, Church was organizing crime organizations in an effort to unite them under one evil dude (himself), which is always bad news.
During all of this, we finally learned what Oliver had promised Laurel on her death bed, and we're not sure how we feel about it. She asked him to make sure she wasn't the last Canary, so that her legacy could live on. But...do we want another Canary??
In other news we're equally conflicted about, Felicity's got a new boyfriend!
She arrived home after a long day of crime fighting and got a back rub from one of the detectives investigating the deaths of all the city crime bosses thanks to Church. (Side note: Why does this city have so many crime bosses??)
We hope this new boyfriend is good news for Felicity, but something tells us this isn't going to add anything fun or pleasant to the Oliver/Felicity situation.
And finally, those pesky flashbacks!
Oliver's in Russia, which means we're finally going to get to find out how and why he got so embedded in the Russian mob. So far, we've learned that he made a promise to to kill someone scary, then set about trying to fulfill that promise with help from his old friend Anatoly.
We also learned that Oliver carried around a book filled with the names of various Star City criminals (many of whom have now been killed by Church), courtesy of his dad, and was "waiting to use it."
What did you think of tonight's premiere? Sound off in the comments!
Arrow airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on the CW.