Well, this was bound to happen eventually. After roughly a season and a half of consistently solid, if occasionally uneven, installments, Arrow hits its first dud with “Guilty.” On the brighter side, considering how many episodes the show must churn out every year, it’s very indicative of the creative team’s skills that this doesn’t happen more often.
It occurred to me while watching the episode that the notion of Roy (possibly) being Sara’s killer was shocking to me primarily because I haven’t really thought much about Roy this season. In the wake of his separation from Thea, Roy has sort of become this weird extra body in what I still very much consider the Team Arrow Trifecta of Oliver, Diggle and Felicity. Ultimately, however, even that dramatic turn is squashed by the episode’s end, leaving us with a heavy-handed attempt at paralleling Oliver and Roy’s strained relationship with a similar dynamic between a couple of thinly drawn supporting characters.
The episode begins with Oliver invading a den of criminals only to discover them all dead, and hung from the ceiling. He quickly puts together that there’s another vigilante out there who, unlike him, has no moral boundaries. Oliver soon finds a suspect in Ted Grant, Laurel’s trainer/new mentor. Apparently, at another point in time, Ted also moonlighted as a vigilante—going as far as to beat a drug dealer to death (a point that Oliver frequently emphasizes throughout the episode). Ted admits to regretting his past, but claims that someone is setting up the crime scenes to look like his handiwork.
Indeed, the real culprit behind this spree is Isaac Stanzler, Ted’s former crime-fighting partner. Apparently the relationship went sour and, while Ted retired his lifestyle, Isaac appears to have gone to the other extreme.
Rather than this being an issue of good vs. bad vigilantism (a topic that was sufficiently covered in previous seasons), the writers clearly want to draw major parallels between the Oliver/Roy and Ted/Isaac dynamic. There’s even a scene late in the episode’s climax when Isaac makes a comment to Roy about how Oliver will use him, and eventually abandon him. Of course, it’s a logical way to structure the hour, but it doesn’t really have the intended impact precisely because Oliver and Roy have not had much of a relationship this season. The one major potential conflict they’ve faced is Roy lying about Thea’s whereabouts, and that didn’t end up affecting them much at all.