The episode is bookended with Oliver sharing his heartbreaking realization with Tatsu that if the Monitor is wrong, he has sacrificed his family for nothing. Read more: Everything You Need to Know About Crisis on Infinite Earths With Diggle, Oliver gets to open up about his horror that in trying to help on Earth 2, he unwittingly (according to the Monitor) hastened the destruction of people identical to those he loves, and countless others. Diggle is clearly the vitally necessary secret sauce to season 8 – it’s impossible to imagine any of this working nearly so well without him. But Stephen Amell and David Ramsey quietly show the devastation and the fear in their conversation at the secret cyber café early on in the episode. We’ve spent plenty of time watching Ollie re-learn the same lessons on Arrowin a way that has often felt frustrating. Tatsu ambushing a fight with China White, to then have Laurel to show up, and then Lyla’s skulking in the background, it means something, never mind the fact that that’s not even all of the women characters in the episode or the show right now. When China White was first on Arrow back in season 1, it was a novelty to have two women on screen in major roles at the same time – and there were basically never more than two at a time. Arrow’s legacy will be discussed and debated at length, but showrunner Beth Schwartz’s legacy will surely be the meaningful inclusion of far more women in the show – and therefore anything downstream, like the upcoming Canaries spinoff. Tatsu, Laurel, and Lyla each had their own moments in the spotlight.

In so many ways, this episode belonged to the women. In Hong Kong back on Earth 1, the pace is necessarily slower and less jaunty after the devastation at the end of the season premiere, but there’s still plenty of old timey Arrow memories, dizzyingly good close combat, and a flash forward to the Diggle brothers to boot. How many times have we heard Oliver say, “there’s always another way”? As the old saying goes, history isn’t exactly repeating, but it does rhyme.

Arrow season 2 episode 8 cast