Oliver and Thea have some family time on Danger Island. Meanwhile, flashback Oliver checks in with his Starling City pals.

Previously on Arrow…. At long last, Thea was let in on the secret of how Oliver spends his nights—that is, running around roughing up people who failed the city. Not the other thing he does with his nights that involve Roy and the salmon ladder and sexy leather getups. She was already clued into that stuff. Laurel finally told her dad that Sara has shuffled off her mortal coil. And Malcolm Merlyn sent Oliver and Thea off on a family-bonding/team-building/potentially-lethal weekend.

So, to keep warm on the frigid island of Lian Yu, Oliver and Thea are whacking each other with sticks. This is like the show’s favorite thing to show our heroes doing, but in all this time I’ve only ever seen Roy bring out the sticks once, so really, is there any point to them?

“Did Malcolm teach you to cheat?” Oliver asks.

“He taught me there’s no such thing. Only survival and death,” Thea replies.

Oliver has to concede that point. “He’s not wrong.”

That evening, they camp out and tell ghost stories and eat S’mores and squirrel. And Thea is about as happy as she has ever been, bonding with her big bro and having all this quality time. Best of all, she feels so close to him because there are no more secrets.

Oliver coughs. “Yeah…. Uh, no more, um…. More squirrel?”

Thea’s neverending list of questions go in the direction of Sara which leads to the wondering of why Oliver kept that bit of important info from her. Oliver (correctly) lays the blame for that lie at Laurel’s feet.

Then Thea asks about who did the killing and Oliver runs away. I got to say, of all the lies he has told and the secrets he has kept, this one is the only one that really makes sense. How do you drop a bomb like that on somebody?

He decides that in order to make himself feel better he’ll go and taunt Slade Wilson. I guess Oliver shares that inclination with his younger, cuter protégé Barry Allen. Only unfortunately for Oliver, Slade has done a runner. See, Oliver, this is why killing enemies is just way more efficient. Malcolm agrees with me…. Um, maybe I need to review my moral code if Malcolm and I are on the same page.

“Dude, you freed Slade Wilson!” Oliver says to the lunatic he has, in Felicity’s words, gotten into bed with.

“What, you thought I sent you to Lian Yu for the scenery? HA! Have fun!”

Even though Slade is no longer hopped up on mirakuru and even though Oliver handily beat him in their last encounter, Oliver has a total meltdown at the idea of being trapped on the island with his loony-tunes ex-friend.

Which turns out to be the right reaction as Slade later jumps them and takes them both out. Then, because he’s cray-cray, he locks them up in the prison with the intent of leaving them there to rot, totally not taking into account that ARGUS will eventually send someone there to check in on the guards who haven’t checked in on account of being dead.

Super-Sized Flashback!

Oliver is back home but with the knowledge that if he pokes anyone on Facebook, Waller will nuke the city or something. She really needs to look into some meds. Or maybe just some marijuana to take the edge off.

Waller’s inexplicable obsession with strong-arming Oliver into working for her at last pays dividends because she needs a Queen to gain access to the Queen Consolidated mainframe. Why is it that everyone can have secure, impossible to hack servers except for Felicity, who happens to be a master techie?

While running this errand, Oliver notices that Thea is indeed having a crisis. Ah, yes, I remember this Thea. Every week it was some new drama. "My Mommy had an affair!" and "No one pays attention to me!" and "My mommy killed five hundred people!" Oh, and major props to the wig department for recreating her S1 hair. Sort of distracts from the fact that she doesn’t in any way look 15.

We also get a return to the unlikable S1 version of Quentin Lance. Didn’t really need that, but sure, okay. He’s all bitchy with Laurel for taking a swanky corporate job rather than staying in Starling and fighting for the little guy. Hey, fighting for the little guy is awesome, but it doesn’t pay off the student loans.

We get to meet Andy Diggle, which suggests that more of that plot may be forthcoming. Because there wasn’t much other reason for him to be there. I mean, if we can have pointless Digg and Felicity cameos, then why couldn’t we have a Roy cameo with him working at the party, in some capacity that may or may not have required clothes?

Oliver goes to stalk Tommy, Laurel and Thea at Tommy’s birthday party. And there he runs into Thea’s drug supplier. He starts by politely asking the reprobate to not sell his baby sister drugs. And the guy unwisely pulls a knife on him.

Oliver kills him just like he killed one of the thugs waaaaaaay back in the pilot. Man, I have missed feral Oliver. I want him back.

Maseo retrieves him from his ill-advised side-quest. Oliver tries to tell Maseo that he was totally safe because he had his hood up. But Maseo isn’t buying it.

“No one would be fooled, even if you smeared grease paint on your face.”

So meta, so awesome.

Oliver decides that he’s gonna quit Team Waller because surely his family can handle one psycho black ops person with unlimited resources, zero oversight and who gets a happy every time she thinks of civilian casualties. Right?

Fortunately for Oliver, his family and everyone within a hundred mile radius, Oliver gets talked down by a recording from his father telling him he has to save the city. And Oliver is like, “Man, and here I was looking forward to finally getting a haircut.”

Maseo has decided to stop China White without his scruffy sidepiece-kick. And he brings along a whole army of ARGUS people, which brings up the question (for the hundredth time) of why Waller needs Oliver at all. Only maybe it doesn’t because they all totally fail and Maseo gets captured.

Then the Hood arrives. Sort of.

Oliver’s first outing as the savior of Starling City was pretty awesome. It was also the first time that we saw a glimmer of the Oliver we know in modern day in the Oliver of the flashbacks.

“You have a choice to make,” Oliver tells China’s toadie.

“What choice?”

“Whether or not you want to keep your hand.”

I love my cray-cray vigilante.

So, China White is caught, the dangerous weapon is retrieved and all is right with the world. Only not, because Waller works for someone with even fewer scruples then she has. And he wants to “debrief” Oliver (don’t we all?) which to me sounded like code for “kill you and leave your body where no one will find it.” Even Waller looked worried.

But Oliver agrees to go back to China, which will be convenient so he can be around when Maseo’s son gets totally murdered by China White’s Triad flunkies.

(Modern) Island Time!

Thea figures that since she and Oliver are trapped forever in Purgatory, he might as well tell her the secret he’s keeping. Oliver isn’t really inclined to go along with that. Instead, he dislocates her shoulder so she can get them out of jail.

I wish we’d seen Captain Boomerang this episode, since he’s stuck in the prison too, but I guess they’re saving that for later fun and games. Or maybe Waller will make Boomerang and Wilson fight to the death. You know, in some sort of arena type thing.

After their jailbreak, Thea doggedly pursues the question of what Oliver is hiding. And he finally fesses up that she sort of kind of killed Sara, but only in a technical sense because Malcolm totally made her do it. Thea reacts better than I had figured she would, which is to say she doesn’t go fetal and start sucking her thumb.

“I’m an idiot,” she says.

Well…. Yeah, but we’re choosing to not hold that against you, Thea, because you’ve been kind of awesome lately.

Slade chooses that moment to take her hostage. And the show got an actual whoop out of me when Thea saves her own damn self. That was even better than the time Felicity outwitted her hot, nerdy, evil ex-boyfriend.

The fight that ensues is epic. Thea and Oliver make a perfect team. Will this cement her place on Team Arrow? I don’t know. (Stephen Amell just let loose an evil blind item which could possibly mean Arsenal is not going to be around anymore.) But she sure did clean Slade’s clock and that was just beautiful to watch.

Then she pulls a gun on Slade and the sh** gets real. Oliver has to beg her to not kill the man who murdered their incomparable mother. Thea figures that since she’s already murdered one person, she might as well go for two.

But in the end she doesn’t. Slade gets put back in his cage like the bad dog he is. He does suggest that Thea is now totally gone to the Dark Side, but Oliver puts his hands over his ears and hums loudly to himself so he can’t hear what Slade is saying.

Quentin Lance pays his respects to his dead daughter with a bottle of Wild Turkey in one hand. Laurel shows up and assures him there’s no need to get drunk just because she’s running around as a vigilante now.

But Quentin’s actual problem is the problem many of us have been having and that’s her being a totally unforgivable lying jerkface. He tells her he can deal with Sara’s death but he has no idea how he can ever trust her again.

I’m totally on his side, in case that wasn’t obvious.

Oliver and Thea arrive back home where Malcolm is waiting for them. Ah, Malcolm, he’s so wonderfully demented. He tries to explain to Thea that he only had her kill Sara for the very best of reasons. Which somehow doesn’t make it all better. I like this Thea. She can stay. (But not at the cost of Roy.)

I love how Malcolm’s all grumpy that Oliver told her what he did. It’s like he just can’t grasp that what he did was fundamentally evil. I’m wondering if this is the last season for Malcolm. That would be a shame, but the cast is rapidly growing way too big. He was supposed to fill the void left by Moira, but let’s face it, no one is up to that task.

Thea tells Malcolm that she’ll work with him but only because her totally awesome brother thinks she should. But he can forget that father-daughter picnic they were planning. And she’s burning the Father’s Day card she bought him.

Malcolm gives Oliver a look which clearly says, “You little bitch.”

And Oliver’s returning look is basically, “Sucks to be you.”

That’s it for this week. What did you all think? Sound off in the comments!