Arrow Season 7 Episode 3 Review: 'Crossing Lines'

The first two episodes of the seventh season of Arrow featured a number of different storylines that had some intersecting at times, while some were self-contained.

Last week's episode in particular had multiple ongoing stories in the episode, while this week's takes a more focused approach with only three stories that included no flash forward sequences.

Coming off the ending to last week's episode that had Oliver acting like a guard stabbed him, which he actually did to himself, to get rid of him for Brick as leverage for information about Diaz, Oliver goes to Brick asking for information.

He informs him that he doesn't have the information on Diaz, but someone known as "The Demon." I thought it was kind of weird the show is using "The Demon" when we've already had "The Demon's Head" play a prominent role in the past.

Brick tells Oliver where to meet "The Demon," which he tries to do when the prisoners are let out of their cells, while being accompanied by his only friend in prison, Stanley.

I am kind of starting to wonder if there might be more to Stanley than meets the eye, but that might just be because it would be the cliche thing to do.

When they get to this room, both of them get ambushed by Bronze Tiger and a few other guys, but Oliver manages to take them all down, even with his injury from stabbing himself, and makes Bronze Tiger talk. He reveals that this was a setup by Brick, but that "The Demon" is a real thing.

He gets them into a secret "meeting" that Brick is hosting in the mess hall, which is actually a fight club that even the guards were fine with and watching.

This felt odd considering one of Greg Berlanti's other series, Riverdale, did this same story just last week, but at least this was quickly finished as Oliver took down Derek Sampson and then went after Brick.

Brick informed Oliver that he'd never meet "The Demon," because he'd have to get to Level 2 of the prison, which is for the worst of the worst.

Right then, Oliver attacks all four of the guards standing there, which we got a tease of to open the episode followed by a 12 hours earlier message, which leads other guards in to take him into the prison's Level 2 as the episode ends.

While Oliver is trying to track down information on Diaz from within prison, Felicity is not giving up finding out herself, which she is doing by going to FBI Agent Watson as we saw at the end of last week's episode. Felicity tries to get her to help find Diaz, which leads to her bugging Watson's office after she says she can't.

She finds out a lead on Diaz through this, which she is watching with Rene that she has recruited to help take down Diaz.

Felicity and Rene ambush both Dinah and Agent Watson about this lead, which is that Diaz is going to break into the CDC to steal something, and they could set a trap to get them.

Both begrudgingly agree and they set the trap up.

All four enter the CDC wearing FBI shirts to say they are just picking up something else, but they set the trap. However, Silencer had some sort of tech that lets Diaz and the other two Longbow Hunters right through security doors, while also disallowing Felicity from trapping them behind the lock, which was their plan.

Dinah goes after Silencer herself while Agent Watson and Rene go after Diaz, Red Dart, and Kodiak. They fail to stop them, with Rene going off to help Dinah who was trapped.

Felicity notices that Silencer was still nearby, so she turns off comms on everybody but Rene and tells him to go after her. At the end, it appears that everybody got away, with them thinking Rene split with the FBI showing up. This mission leads to Agent Watson getting reassigned to DC as they didn't apprehend Diaz and she had gone against her superior's orders to do this mission.

Felicity keeps from her, however, that actually Rene had caught up to Silencer and we see that both Felicity and he had her trapped down in some warehouse as she is their only lead to Diaz.

Felicity and Rene obviously don't trust the law itself to actually do anything, so this should be interesting to see moving forward.

I thought Felicity was a bit whiny in this episode, but she also had the right to be at times as well.

The final storyline of the episode was really nothing more than filler for now, though it could potentially tie in later in some way. Diggle, Lyla, and Curtis go to Switzerland to obtain financial records from a bank for ARGUS. This is done by having Diggle and Lyla go in with a replica of a very rare painting with nanomachines on it to allow for data transfer via Curtis in a nearby van. 

They successfully get this info, though Curtis noticed interference in the transfer like someone else was copying the info as well. He confronts Diggle and he says it was not him, leading to him confronting Lyla himself.

She reveals that she's gotten wind of some really bad things going on in the world that ARGUS is not doing enough to handle, so she's following some of her own leads and needed that information to keep that trail going.

I'm curious if this will tie into the main story of the season at all or if it was just a side filler story to give the characters something to do.

Most plots like this usually turn into something, but we'll have to wait and see what happens.

'Crossing Lines' was definitely a fitting title for this episode as we saw this happening across all three main plots.

Oliver moving to Level 2 of the prison should be interesting and I'm personally hoping we see some other surprise inmates from the past here as well.

Wanna read more on this? Check these out: Arrow Season 7 Episode 4 Review: 'Level Two' (more); Arrow Season 7 Episode 2 Review: 'The Longbow Hunters' (more); Arrow Season 7 Episode 1 Review: 'Inmate 4587' (more); Superman And Lois Lane Confirmed To Appear In Big Arrowverse Crossover Episodes (more).

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