ARROW: TIME TO CATCH UP WITH THEA QUEEN AND MALCOLM MERLYN
Stephen Amell, Willa Holland and John Barrowman on this week's trip to Corto Maltese.
22 OCT 2014 BY ERIC GOLDMAN
This week’s
Arrow, “Corto Maltese”, is notable for a couple of reasons – beginning with the DC Comics location it’s named after, which was first introduced by Frank Miller in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and has since been referenced in everything from Tim Burton’s Batman film (remember Vicki Vale's photos that caught Joker's eye?) to Smallville.
But more importantly, it’s who’s in Corto Maltese that is of note: Malcolm Merlyn and Thea Queen. As the final scene in last week’s episode indicated, Malcolm has been training his daughter – which doesn’t seem like it’s a good thing, given the terrible actions Malcolm has caused in the past.
Stephen Amell as Oliver Queen in Arrow: "Corto Maltese."
In the episode, Oliver, accompanied by Diggle and Roy, will go looking for his sister. As
Stephen Amell notes, “[Oliver] knows very little about what she’s done other than that she has lied about where she is. We find out very early on in episode three that she’s been saying that she’s in the Amalfi Coast and she is not. Oliver calls her on that immediately. Oliver comes to the realization that the only way to bring her home when it was lies that drove her away is that he has to tell her the truth. How much of the truth he has to tell her is one of the crucial points of the episode.”
Willa Holland explained that Thea’s been in Corto Maltese “Since she hopped in that limo with Malcolm. As you can see, he’s been putting her under his wing a little bit for the last five months. She’s been up to… not necessarily up to no good; she’s just been up to something a little bit different for Thea.”
Willa Holland as Thea Queen and Stephen Amell as Oliver Queen in Arrow.
This episode’s flashbacks will specifically focus on Thea and Malcolm and what happened in the months since we last saw them.
John Barrowman teased a particularly big scene, saying, “All I’ll say to you is please just watch it because it’s one of those moments where your jaw will hit the floor. So please put a pillow down. It’s one of those moments where if I were in my house, I’d open the window and, ‘What are you listening to?’ ‘The nation’s jaw dropping. ‘That’s literally what it’s going to be like. It’s going to be exciting. Something is going to come at you as a shock and a surprise. That’s all I’ll say.”
Said Holland, “You’re just going to see a very interesting father-daughter relationship. Thea Queen and Malcolm Merlyn is not going to be anything anywhere near normal, and I don’t think anybody would expect it to be. I don’t know if I can reveal too much. You’ll definitely see in the next episode. It will pretty much explain their relationship, the way it is right now.”
John Barrowman as Malcolm Merlyn in Arrow.
Describing Malcolm’s emotional manipulation tactics, Barrowman remarked, “I think Malcolm, he’s learning about emotional manipulation because he’s never been able to tell somebody really how he feels. He’s always done it in an off the cuff, backhanded way. But he’s always been honest. As brutal as it may be at times, I think he’s probably one of the most honest people on the show. That’s my opinion. Because he tells it like it is. He tells the truth. Not everybody likes to hear the truth. But I think his emotional manipulation is more straight forward, rather than it being to manipulate. No it’s straightforward in order to manipulate. It really is. Some people would lie and tell fibs about stuff but in a particular scene that is coming up, there’s straightforward down the line truth and the person is overwhelmed by what they’re hearing.”
Holland said that from her point of view, “I think there is weirdly some trust there between Thea and Malcolm. Malcolm has kind of proven the fact that he wouldn’t want to put Thea in to harms way because he does actually care for her because he does know that she is his blood and kind of the last living [relative] that he has right now. Knowing Malcolm’s past, it’s definitely hard for Thea to trust him but I think over the last five months, she’s gotten to know Malcolm in a different way than everybody else has seen him. They have a different type of relationship than you would expect for them off the bat.”
As for Thea’s reunion with Oliver, Holland noted, “He does start to open up to her a little more because the main reason she had to leave was because of all of the lies and everything that she has just been battling through for the last two seasons. In all honesty, Malcolm is who he is but the one thing he hadn’t done to Thea was lie to her about who he was. He’s very open and honest about it so I think that’s something very interesting about their relationship. But pertaining to Oliver and Thea, you’ll see in the next episode, he definitely tries to open up to her and be more honest with her… but it may be in the way that we think but it also might not be!”
http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/10/22/arrow-time-to-catch-up-with-thea-queen-and-malcolm-merlyn
Oliver is the WOAT at keeping his identity safe. i'm only up to episode 16 and already he's let 4 people know.
