Slade

Dear Wal,

I know I forgot to post yesterday. I apologize. It won't happen again. I'm writing to you on Saturday to make up for my irresponsibility. I also realized that I missed an episode of Arrow, so I remedied this via the CW website, and happily watched the latest episode. Now it's time for the review.
Let ,me say before I begin, that this show only gets better and better.
Granted, this last episode was a little heavy on flashbacks. Oliver spends most of his time unconscious, because he was shot by a certain person he threatened in the episode (you go girl! Kill that vigilante!), and lost in the world of his past on the island. But the extended flashback is far from boring, unlike certain Hush comics I need not mention. Slade really begins to get more involved in the story, which is fantastic despite his bizarre accent. Is he actually Australian? None the less, Slade deals out lots of punishment to the bad guys and Oliver, as he begins the painstaking process of Oliver's training. It's nice to see Slade outside of Teen Titans. Not that Teen Titans wasn't great, because it was, but it's nice to see Slade with some character development. I thought he was awesome on Teen Titans, but it always irked me that we never really found out anything about him. Then again, that was the best part about him. I always secretly thought, when I was a poor little noob, that Slade on Teen Titans was Batman, testing Robin's ability to lead his team. It makes sense, doesn't it?
One thing I've learned over the course of this show is that every new character, and the name of every new character, is significant in relation to the comics. Nothing, or at least very few things (ex: Walter) are meaningless. As far as I've seen, the people working on this show have really done their homework, and they really respect the source material. Even though I've never actually read any of the source material..I've spent enough time on Wikipedia to realize that. Nothing thus far has been mucked up or made simply silly like what was done with many characters on Smallville (granted, Superman is a hard character to update and realisticify....that's not a word). But who is Billy Wintergreen? Anyone? Google proved useless on this one.
Besides Slade, Yao Fei's motivation for teaming up for the bad guys is finally revealed. I didn't honestly believe that he was actually willing to work with them, but for a minute there he threw me. Another layer of mystery has been added to what happened to Oliver on island, with the introduction of the dragon tattoo. What exactly does it mean? I'm guessing it's some kind of secret order of archers that Oliver eventually becomes a member of. Who knows, maybe Merlyn is a member as well.
This episode is the first where we start to see the transition between  the man Oliver is when he is shipwrecked on the island, and the man he is when he becomes the Hood. He's got, for the first time since being wrecked on the island, that emotionally removed look in his eyes that so characterizes him. What I'm wondering, is how he went from dirty blond to brown. I prefer the blonde.
Let me just say that this is an excellent way to tell an origin story. The frame narrative works so much better than spending ten years mucking around in high school, without even a decent costume. This way we can enjoy the nuances of an origin story we already mostly know, while still feeling like the story has a point. And although we know the basics of GA's origin story, there's still enough mystery surrounding it for it to be engaging. A better example of this tactic is Person of Interest, where parts of the back story of both main characters, Harold and John, are told as the current.story-taking place in real time-needs them.

/endrant