This Arrow review contains spoilers.

Well, this was certainly better, wasn’t it? Arrow bounced back from a series of questionable episodes with “Broken Arrow.” While this one often felt more like a backdoor pilot for Brandon Routh’s upcoming star turn in a still-untitled Atom-centric superhero team show, it handled all its moving pieces considerably better than last night’s counterpart on The Flash.

“Broken Arrow” isn’t without its problems, though. When a colleague tells Quentin Lance to lay off the Arrow case because, as he puts it, “you’ve come so far,” I couldn’t help but agree. I’m going to try not to keep barking about my disapproval of Lance’s storyline during the second half of this season. There’s nothing I can do about it, so now all I can do is hope for the best. Perhaps, though, now that he thinks he’s got a little satisfaction (at the expense of Roy’s “life”), he’ll mellow out a little.

I do now at least feel that the stakes have been legitimately raised, even if some of the more obvious “big changes” are probably going to result in easy fixes (Roy’s fake death, Thea’s impending dip in a Lazarus Pit, a heart-attack for Quentin Lance insuring that Oliver’s secret identity goes to the grave with him). I’m pretty sure about those things…but I don’t know how sure I am. With Roy “gone” from Team Arrow now, does this mean that the rest of Arrow season three is going to be devoted to taking more of Oliver’s pieces off the board? How much more can they break him down?