The Heir to the Demon finds out what happened to Sara and all hell breaks loose. And Oliver finds out that for some reason bad people refuse to stay dead.

Previously on Arrow.... Team Arrow decided, contrary to reason, that Starling City would be a much better place if Thea Queen was back and so they ran off to Corto Maltese to fetch her. Unbeknownst to them (but knownst to us) Thea has been turned evil by her psycho father Malcolm Merlyn. But Oliver promises to stop lying to her if she'll come home and so she relents. A good time was had by all and upon their return they found themselves facing off with a pissed off lesbian.

Nyssa al Ghul has been poking Sara on Facebook for weeks to no avail so she's decided to come and see what the heck is going on. One look at Oliver's face tells her the bad news. And she deduces instantly that Sara died by arrows, but she won't say why because she doesn't want the boys interfering with her murderous rampage of revenge.

Oliver can tell she's not sharing, so he assigns Roy to shadow her. Roy gives him this look like, "Why do I have to follow the scary, homicidal lesbian?" but he does as he's told because he's a good boy.

Oliver then meets up with Thea and offers to pay for dinner. "With what money?" she asks, as if she's been reading my recaps. Oliver's all, "Well, you're broke too!" and Thea comes back with, "Nope, I'm reopening the hugely successful and popular club that you started and I stole from you and you apparently forgot could be a major source of income."

And no one ever really answers the question of what money Oliver has or doesn't have. I'm starting to think the show is doing this deliberately just to see how long it takes before I totally lose my mind.

Hong Kong Fuey!

Well, they're struggling for relevance with this storyline now, so I'll reward their efforts by paying a tiny bit of attention to these weird distractions in the show I'm trying to watch.

Oliver has now accepted that he is Amanda Waller's bitch, which was basically inevitable. Still unexplained is why she's bothering, but this version of Waller just seems to get up to whacky, sinister plotting simply for giggles.

Oliver is pretty sullen about the whole thing. "What, I'm just some toy that she can grab and oil up and use whenever she wants?"

Wait, no, wrong analogy.

"I'm just a gun she can use to murder people?"

"Ayep. Now stop whining," says his handler Maseo Yamashiro.

And so Oliver does it. Wow. No coy sidestepping, no sneaky tricks. He just straight up kills a guy he doesn't know. That's pretty hardcore. But the show will tell us that he was really an evil puppy-killing lunatic, right?

Nope. Oliver finds out the guy actually worked for Waller and was a part of the operation involving Edward Fyers from season one. She was just cleaning house and using Oliver as the broom. Oliver rather unwisely thinks that he now has something resembling leverage so he summons her to Hong Kong for a meeting.

She's not impressed with his sleuthing. She's annoyed. And she's not sorry at all for trying to shoot down an entire jetliner. She was trying to kill China White. And with Waller, collateral damage is just sort of par for the course. Instead of sending assassins, she prefers to send in a drone strike to level everything in a quarter-mile-radius of the target just to be safe.

Oliver blackmails her to get Maseo's family out of danger. That's definitely going to come back to bite him in the ass later. Waller takes blackmailing personally, I'm just sure of it.

Back to the actual show now. Nyssa goes to visit Sara's grave where she runs into Laurel. To her credit, she's very polite to Laurel and offers her condolences. Laurel, of course, just has to start shit. "It's your fault she died!" and so on. Man, Laurel loves the blame game.

Nyssa finally has enough and lays into Laurel about how she loved Sara and how Laurel isn't worthy of wearing her jacket. It's really bad for Laurel to be in scenes with any of the other female characters on this show because it just emphasizes how terribly inadequate in every way she is.

Thanks to Roy's intel, Oliver tracks Nyssa to a safe house. Then he gets in her face about how she isn't doing enough, and by that he means she isn't telling him stuff he really wants to know. Nyssa finally relents, sensing she just won't be able to keep him out of her business.

"Okay, okay. Malcolm Merlyn did it. Now please go away."

Oliver takes that news pretty well, all things considered.

Apparently, Malcolm was released from his League membership for whatever reason but he promised to behave and only kill people that really deserved it. Then he went and unleashed the Undertaking and that put him in Ra's al Ghul's bad books.

With Nyssa's help, they find out that Sara contacted Captain Quentin Lance about something or someone named "Jansen." This gives Laurel a chance to be even more horrible and perpetuate and expand the lie that Sara is alive and well. I thought I was going to hate this plot, but it turns out that I loathe it deeply and personally.

Nyssa is on my side. Though her motivations seem to run along the lines of "he deserves to take part in the revenge festival we're preparing" but that's just how she rolls. Nevertheless, she goes along with Laurel's utterly repulsive deception.

Team Arrow lays siege to a Buddhist Monastery in search of Jansen. I am delighted that Diggle joined in on the fun, but one has to wonder just what the point is of Roy and Oliver having masks and Diggle just hanging out in civies. No one thinks it will be suspicious that Diggle is only ever seen with two people, Oliver Queen and the Arrow?

Instead of Jansen, they find the man himself. Malcolm knows better than to take on a furious assassin who thinks he killed her lover, so he bails. Oliver gets a piece of him, though. And wouldn't we all like even a piece of that?

Laurel isn't satisfied, though. For a D.A., she's really into the whole, "kill people first, sort out the guilty later" notion. Also, it's pretty hilarious watching Nyssa's expression of "you go girl" during the exchange.

Oliver tries this old chestnut: "Do you think that's what Sara would want?"

And Laurel correctly replies, "Um, my League of Assassins, lethal crusader for justice sister? Hells yeah."

Nyssa offers to talk it out with Laurel, which naturally translates into Laurel telling her to kill Malcolm deader than dead and Nyssa happily agreeing. Nyssa also seems to appreciate seeing that vengeful, murderous light in Laurel's eyes.

Oliver's little flesh wound was actually a tracer arrow. Anyone who's ever seen Alias would know that this trick never, ever, ever works, but Oliver has total faith in this plan. So he's quite unhappy when Malcolm dodges his trap and calls him up to say, in his best Nelson voice, "Ha ha!"

He offers to instead meet Oliver in a busy plaza. Oliver blusters and threatens, but Malcolm of course is totally confident and secure in his awesomeness. He explains that he came back to Starling City for Thea and that he's watching out for her in a distant, not-actually-seeing-her kind of way. And then he swears on her life that he didn't kill Sara, which is good enough for Oliver.

In order to keep his promise to Thea, he doesn't keep secret from her that Malcolm is alive and kicking. And little miss "I can't stand the lies" just lies like a rug. She acts horrified and scared at the very idea that Malcolm isn't dead.

Totally. Evil.

Well, Oliver may buy Malcolm's story but Nyssa has a "guilty until I say otherwise" policy. Then, because Oliver really isn't the brightest crayon in the box, he tells the crazy, hell-bent-on-revenge woman that Thea is Malcolm's daughter.

That can't possibly lead anywhere bad, can it?

Digg and Roy totally get that Oliver doesn't want to kill folk no more. But technically speaking, it's not really killing to just take a night off and let the psycho assassin woman cut Malcolm into very small pieces, right?

Naturally, Thea gets totally kidnapped. I'm guessing she doesn't fight back so as to not let Roy in on the secret that she's an evil liar person now. Plus, she trusts her dad will ride in to the rescue, so it's really no big thing.

Laurel feels a tad bit guilty, since she sort of told Nyssa to get Malcolm no matter what. Isn't it funny how people make these deals, saying "whatever the cost" and then later they find out the cost isn't to their liking? Don't give creepy assassins carte blanche to exact revenge, is all I'm saying.

We get a nice little threeway action with Malcolm and Oliver and Nyssa all fighting each other in their badass way. And to my utter and complete surprise, Oliver bests the both of them. Wow. I'm so used to watching him get his ass kicked that I forget sometimes that he's a super hero.

Malcolm tells them, again, that he isn't the killer. He probably isn't. But then, this could all be some long con of his with the endgame of dethroning Ra's al Ghul. Heck, if they bring in the Lazarus Pit, it could even have something to do with Malcolm wanting to bring back his dead wife. With him, you just never know.

Oliver believes him, but there is that little matter of the mass murder. Malcolm cops to that, but he scoffs at the idea that any prison could hold him—even Oliver's super secret prison on Lian Yu. I do like a powerful bad guy, but Malcolm is starting to border on omnipotence and I'm not sure that's a good thing.

Nyssa is displeased with Oliver. But he isn't done yet because he actually (and inexplicably) puts Malcolm under his protection. There are times when I desperately miss season one Oliver. He was a guy who could get the job done.

Before leaving town, Nyssa checks in with Laurel and lets her know that Malcolm is still on her "to kill" list. Laurel seems to have accepted that Malcolm isn't guilty of killing Sara, but since he did kill Tommy and five hundred other people, she's completely on board with the "kill Malcolm in ugly ways" plan.

Nyssa gives her some boxing tips on her way out: "Move your hips, that's where the power is" which sounded to me a lot like "when I'm done grieving I'll be back to canoodle you until your eyes cross."

Thea is totally unaffected by her latest kidnapping, which Oliver thinks is weird. However, this is Oliver who has this massive blind spot with regards to his family. I wonder what it's going to take to get him to accept that Thea has gone over to the dark side.

The show wraps with Nyssa going home and giving her dad all the info on Malcolm Merlyn and saying she will have her revenge. But Ra's doesn't care about Sara and has no interest in getting revenge for her death, which maybe should be a giant red flag for Nyssa. He is still going forward with plans to kill Malcolm, though, so maybe that's enough for her.

And that's it for this week. Sound off in the comments!