TV REVIEWS: FTN Reviews Arrow Season 06 Episode 13: The Devil’s Greatest Trick

A little over halfway through the season and Arrow has now delivered another big shakeup, this time on the villain front, for the Cayden James conflict has come to an end, and a new snake has arisen to take his place. Or should I say…Dragon?

For all its good points, “The Devil’s Greatest Trick” made it pretty clear that Ricardo Diaz was the traitor here. It didn’t help that early reports for Arrow slated him to be the Season’s Big Bad, which only confused people when Cayden James arrived and brought Diaz into his crew. Anatoly, for all his anger towards Oliver, wouldn’t have done what he did, and Black Siren isn’t that clear, so it had to be Diaz. I liked his seen with Cayden at the end, as he showed that Cayden didn’t have him pegged as well as he thought.

Thankfully, before his death, we got more insight into why Cayden was the way he was. He wasn’t a vengeful father solely, he was a distraught one. His work with Helix made it so that he couldn’t spend enough quality time with his son. And finding out about his death the way was a truly powerful scene. The question is, what now? Diaz is playing the shadow game here, and has already bought some people in Star City. He knows Oliver’s identity, and the rest of his team, so what’s the play here? I hope it’s convincing, as there’s only 10 episodes left this season.

The other really good part of this episode was the feud between Black Siren and Black Canary. Dinah is blinded by her rage over Vincent’s death, to the point where she tried to get Team Arrow to go after her once the dust settled with the bomb. Their fight scenes were great, as were the continued scenes with Quentin and Laurel. Quentin’s…well…he’s kind of gone fatal attraction here. But in the love-love way, but the father-daughter way. He wants to bring “his Laurel” back, and I truly think he’ll go to great lengths to get it done.

Some of the other aspects though didn’t work. William’s “desire” to be with his dad really came off as weird. He literally walked into a place with a bomb to ‘spend time with his dad”. Really? What’s more, Renee’s continued (and repetitive) line about “nothing changing” is getting really old. We get it, you don’t like Oliver, and don’t want to be on the team, HE KNOWS!!!

With this threat over, I’m intrigued to see how Arrow moves forward. We know some allies are returning to the city (Roy, Nyssa), but how will they factor into everything? Guess we’ll find out soon.