Arrow season 7 episode 4 "Level Two" saw various members of Team Arrow starting to mend the broken bonds of friendship and partnership that were strained to the breaking point across the whole of season 6 and in the wake of Oliver Queen's incarceration in "Life Sentence". Ironically, this occurred as Oliver Queen himself was pushed to the breaking point by a sinister psychiatrist on the titular Level Two - the section of Slabside Penitentiary reserved for the worst of the worst.
As Oliver was subjected to psychological torment and electric shock therapy, Felicity found herself forming an unlikely alliance with Black Siren to drag the information on Ricardo Diaz's whereabouts out of his hired assassin, The Silencer. At the same time, Dinah Drake and Rene Ramriez almost came to blows over Dinah's efforts to capture the new Green Arrow, thanks to orders issued directly from Star City's new mayor. This posed a problem for Rene, whose daughter was saved by the new Green Arrow following a fire at the community center he works at and as near as Rene could tell this new Green Arrow was the only person working to stop a string of arson attempts that were destroying his neighborhood. Thankfully, the two eventually came to an accord and even worked with the new Green Arrow to stop the arsonists.
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"Level Two" also saw the return of the flash-forwards to the year 2038, where William Clayton journeyed to Lian Yu and discovered an exiled Roy Harper. After uncovering Oliver Queen's first bow, the two returned to a dystopian Star City. This led to an encounter with Dinah Drake and a number of questions about just what has happened to Star City and its heroes in the not-too-distant future.
10. Again, Who Is The New Green Arrow?
The identity of the new Green Arrow remains the biggest mystery in the present-day storyline of Arrow. Any lingering doubts that he might be John Diggle - Oliver Queen's hand-picked successor in the role - were firmly eliminated by the events of "Level Two." Both Dinah Drake and Rene Ramirez got close enough to the new Green Arrow to see under his hood and made no sign of recognizing him. Had it been Digg under the hood, they surely would have said something. We also see that the new Green Arrow has a lighter skin tone than Digg at the scene of the second fire in The Glades.
The fact that Rene and Dinah don't recognize the new Green Arrow could be evidence that he is Roy Harper, Oliver Queen's first protege. Roy left Star City back when it was still Starling City in season 3, as part of the plan that forced him to fake his death after taking the rap for Oliver's crimes. Rene and Dinah didn't join Team Arrow until season 5, and neither one of them have ever met Roy. The new Green Arrow also showed a penchant for parkour, acrobatically flipping as he made his escape and climbing a drain pipe with ease. Roy was also talented in parkour and frequently worked it into his fighting style.
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As for the theory that the future William Clayton might travel back in time to take up his father's mantle at the time when Star City most needed a Green Arrow to save it, there is nothing new in "Level Two" to support that idea directly. Thematically, however, there is something to hint at that outcome, as most of Oliver's scenes in the episode dealt with him going through psychiatric evaluation at Slabside Penitentiary. The attending psychiatrist kept hammering Oliver over the promise Ollie made to his father, Robert Queen, to make amends for his crimes and Oliver's fears that William would grow up to become a killer and a criminal following in his footsteps. It seems quite likely this point may have been raised as a bit of dramatic irony regarding the story yet to come in season 7.
9. How Is Black Siren Posing As A Lawyer?
The question of how Black Siren can convincingly masquerade as a lawyer was raised by many fans following the news in "Inmate 4587" that Black Siren had gone beyond posing as Laurel Lance in public and been appointed as the new District Attorney of Star City. Many felt this was unlikely given the strong anti-vigilante policies of Star City's new mayor, as it would be hard for the new mayor to sell her platform while putting a known vigilante (the real Laurel's identity as Black Canary was revealed to the world in season 4) in charge of the District Attorney's office. And then there was the problem of Black Siren acting as a lawyer with no formal training and no resources apart from Quentin Lance's gift of his daughter's old books.
Felicity further hung a lampshade on this point in "Level Two". When Felicity arrived at the District Attorney's office to ask for Black Siren's help, she expressed surprise that Black Siren appeared to be in the middle of filling out legal paperwork. When Black Siren grumbled and asked why everyone seemed surprised at this fact, Felicity pointed out that she was "not the real Laurel and not a real lawyer," creating a wonderful tongue-twister in the process.
8. What Happened To the Rest Of The Lances On Earth 2?
At one point while talking with Felicity, Black Siren discusses her past and how she fell into a life of crime. As in previous episodes, the Laurel Lance of Earth 2 blames her going bad on the deaths of the two most important men in her life: her father, Quentin Lance, who was killed by a drunk driver on her 13th birthday while going out to buy her a cake, and her version of Oliver Queen, who died at sea.
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Ignoring the blame-shifting and codependency inherent to this excuse, Black Siren's story raises some major questions about the rest of the Lance family on Earth 2. For instance, audiences have no idea if Sara Lance exists on Earth 2, or if Black Siren was an only child. Audiences also know nothing of Black Siren's mother, but if she is anything like the Dinah Lance of Earth-1, then it seems unlikely she stand idly by and put up with her daughter becoming a career criminal. Perhaps she was Black Siren's first victim?
7. Is Star City 2038 Leading Into Star City 2046?
"Star City 2046" - a season 1 episode of Legends of Tomorrow - offered the first look at the future of Star City in the Arrowverse. Here, a one armed Oliver Queen and John Diggle Jr. were all that remained to save Star City from Grant Wilson, who had followed in his father's footsteps as a new Deathstroke. The Legends helped the two Green Arrows defeat Deathstroke and his army, leaving the two to rebuild a devastated Star City.
Given that the Star City of 2038 that audiences see in "Level Two" is similarly dystopic, it's fair for viewers to wonder if the future viewers see in season 7 is the same one as in "Star City 2046", only eight years earlier. Presumably this is why Arrow showrunner Beth Schwartz nipped these rumors in the bud, saying, "This is not connected. This is our own future." Also, the future seen in "Star City 2046" has almost certainly been changed, as the Oliver Queen of 2046 told the Legends that in his timeline they had all disappeared and never returned to their original time period - something the Legends have accomplished several times over the first three seasons of Legends of Tomorrow.
6. Is XS From The Same Timeline As Star City 2038?
Fans of the Arrowverse may also wonder how to reconcile the future of Star City 2038 and what viewers know of the future of Central City 2049 from the current season of The Flash. The main plot of The Flash season 5 has centered around Nora West-Allen (aka XS), Barry Allen and Iris West's speedster daughter from 31 years in the future.
While Nora's discussions of the future have largely been limited to the metahuman villains her father is meant to fight, she has revealed details such as the existence of a Flash Museum in 2032 and that there are still newspapers in 2049. None of this seems to match up with fascist state audiences see in the Star City of 2038. Then again, Star City and Central City are, well... two different cities.
Page 2 of 2: Even More Questions From Arrow Season 7 Episode 4
5. Is Star City 2038 a precursor to Zari Tomaz's time?
Curiously, what fans see of Star City in 2038 does match up with a different alternate future - the one that Zari Tomaz came from before joining the crew of the Waverider in Legends of Tomorrow. First appearing in the season 3 episode "Zari", the titular heroine was a hacktivist in Seattle 2042. Her premiere episode revealed that the future American government had outlawed metahumans, vigilantes, and religion, thus making the devout Muslim hacker with a magic amulet, which let her control the wind, into an enemy of the state several times over.
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This would seem to match up fairly well with what audiences see of Star City 2038, where the Glades have been turned into some kind of high-security gated community set apart from the squalor of Star City and vigilantes are to be shot on sight.
4. Which Green Arrow Comics Inspired Star City 2038?
Surprisingly, the idea of a walled-off city existing within Green Arrow's hometown has come up more than once in the comics. The first instance came in 2006 during the One Year Later event, in which the on-going storyline of all of DC Comics' books jumped forward one year. It was here that Oliver Queen was elected Mayor of Star City, after the previous mayor - in response to a supervillain attack devastating much of the city - elected to build a wall around the poorest, most crime-ridden parts of town while waiting for various businesses to buy up the land and gentrify the devastated neighborhoods.
The second instance came during "The Rise of Star City" storyline from Green Arrow: Rebirth. It was here that a sinister cabal of Satanic bankers, The Ninth Circle, undertook an effort to turn Seattle into the first of several "Star Cities" - communities run entirely on Randian Capitalism, with no social services or public works save those which privately-owned companies were willing to invest in. This resulted in an over-sized gated community, where the rich got richer and the poor, forced into the slums outside the city proper, got poorer. This later case sounds very much like what happened to The Glades and Star City in the future of 2038.
3. What is Dinah and Roy's Relationship in The Future?
When Dinah Drake saves Roy Harper and William Clayton from the police in Star City 2038, she makes several cryptic comments about Roy. First, she says that he never should have come back to Star City, with clear hostility in her voice. She later says that he used to be much more patient. Since the two haven't met in the world of Star City 2018, this begs the questions of how the two vigilantes do meet and what the nature of their relationship is?
2. Where Is The Rest of Team Arrow In Star City 2038?
By the end of "Level Two", viewers learn that Rene Ramirez's daughter Zoe has become a vigilante and that Dinah Drake left the SCPD to become Black Canary once again. When asked about her father, Zoe only says that he wouldn't be caught dead in Star City. Dinah also reveals that Felicity Smoak is dead. This leaves the better part of Team Arrow unaccounted for, raising questions as to what has happened to Oliver Queen, John Diggle, Lyla Michaels, and Curtis Holt in the future, as well as anyone else who joins Team Arrow along the way.
1. If Felicity Is Dead, Who Is Sending William The Puzzles?
Most of the flash-forward scenes focus on William solving a variety of puzzles, seemingly left behind by Felicity. These include a coding puzzle that Felicity once showed him as a child, which unlocks a vault containing a Rubik's Cube. The cube itself contains a hologram projector, which reveals a map of secret passages into The Glades once William twists the cube around to create a cube within a cube - a pattern that was his favorite one to create when playing learning games with Felicity.
All of these puzzles were seemingly built around knowledge that only Felicity and William had, yet, according to Dinah Drake, Felicity is dead. So who is sending William the puzzles and why? Hopefully, some of these questions will be answered in next week's episode.
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Arrow season 7 airs Mondays on The CW.
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