Arrow Season 3 Episode 21 "Al Sah-him"

Tell me what you guys think:

I love the fact that we are getting some knowledge on Damian Dark the villain for season 4. Poor Nyssa, Ras is very cruel forcing his lesbian daughter into a straight marriage. Hopefully that marriage is stopped. Diggle in this episode was great. I also enjoyed Nyssa.

Arrow has been so much better the pass three episodes and continues to get better :)

Its a good episode minus the Felicity drama.

One of the best episodes of the season. I like that ollies gone back to no nonesense killing, hope he stays this wauy for atleast half a season and allow the other characters to come into the fold,

I liked it.

Really good, loved the canary cry.

Another great episode. Arrow is still hitting back on track. That's good news.

Did Damien Dark appear in the comics? I was wondering if Ra's al Ghul named Batman and Talia's son after the first Ra's al Ghul. I can't wait to see him.

It was definitely great to see focus on the secondary cast again. I feel like the show's attempts to take Oliver out of the picture and put focus on other characters have been lacking in the past. Here, I actually believed that they could be a functional unit with real relationships between them. That being said, there were a few weird scenes (Nyssa and Laurel at the diner, while cute, seemed a bit contrived and dopey to me). And it's a bit disappointing to see another couple of parallels between Oliver and Batman in this episode (being forced to wed and impregnate Nyssa; poison Oliver's city).

But Thea and Nyssa were really the stars of this episode. I love that Thea is finally interacting with Team Arrow and taking steps towards joining them. And something about this nearly all-female Team Arrow is just really bad ass. I hope we'll be seeing Thea in a mask soon and actually using Speedy as her alias.

I'm a bit worried that the show won't have a great excuse for keeping Roy out of the picture. His departure made sense when it happened. But with all that's happened since he left (which despite only being two episodes ago, has been a lot) I can't see how they'll justify him staying away, if even just to help them against Oliver and the League. But that's a worry for another day.

Also a shout-out to Diggle and Lyla, who were both fantastic in this episode.

And, as always, the flashbacks just kinda sucked. I like Oliver. I like Maseo. I like Tatsu. But I just cannot get into the flashbacks. It'll be nice to see present-day Tatsu as Katana next week, and will hopefully help to make the flashbacks more relevant/interesting. But even so, I'm hoping for a drastic decrease in flashbacks next season. Flash utilizes flashbacks rarely but always with purpose. Maybe Arrow could do to follow that formula. Show us Oliver's fourth year away every couple of episode WHEN IT ACTUALLY MATTERS as opposed to every episode.

8/10. Solid character episode that may have dragged in a few places, and felt a bit cliche/contrived in others. Looking forward to the next two episodes.