Arrow Season 5 Episode 15 Review

I can’t in good conscience call it a shocking twist that Adrian Chase turns out to be Prometheus instead of Vigilante. That may sound surprising—perhaps even a tad hypocritical—given my previous assumption that Vigilante’s secret identity would be Chase, his comics alter ego. And, in fairness, tonight’s episode does a brilliant job with its Chase misdirect. Before tonight, Arrow has shown us flashes of Chase’s mental instability and propensity for violence, but it avoided suggesting any real connections between Chase and either of the city’s murderous villains. That changes tonight, though, as “Fighting Fire With Fire” does all it can to tease a reveal of Chase as Vigilante. He pointedly disappears just before Vigilante attacks the limousine, and he just as pointedly shows up in the immediate aftermath, all before displaying plenty of menace as he takes the piece of Vigilante’s visor off Dinah. After spending little time at all on even asking the question of Vigilante’s alter ego, Arrow shifts gears and appears to solve the mystery in short order. Chase is Vigilante. No big surprise there. Except, after a short confrontation between Prometheus and Vigilante, the misdirect is revealed, and Chase shows himself to be Prometheus instead.

It’s a terrific moment, a well-executed swerve after all the first act’s clues. And while I don’t mean to take anything away from its immediate effectiveness, it still isn’t that surprising if you consider this Arrow season as a whole. It’s just a basic question of how storytelling works. The fact that Prometheus’ identity is mysterious means there has to be a reveal, and that reveal has to have an impact.
 

But no, the answer really has to be Adrian Chase, and it’s only a certain default fealty to the comics source material among a section of the fans—myself included—that made that anything but the most obvious thing in the world. While I realize that sounds critical, this is actually an effort to locate just what is so impressive about the Adrian Chase reveal. It’s a twist that is shocking in the moment, yet instantly yields to the satisfaction that it could not possibly have been anything else. And unlike past Arrowverse reveals—The Flash has a particularly nasty habit of this—tonight’s episode doesn’t overegg the twist, having Chase unmask at the end of the episode and then stringing out his in-universe unmasking for a bit longer. Instead, Chase instantly ratchets up the creepiness and ends the episode by threatening Susan Williams, with the teaser for the next episode indicating that it’s all about to kick off between Adrian and Oliver. This is all just good, solid escalation of the story, even if Vigilante now feels even more preposterously mysterious than he was before, and not necessarily in a particularly compelling way.

Overall, Arrow has narrowed its focus, and now its the beginning of the end. I look forward to how the show handles this twist.