The women of Team Arrow took center-stage in Arrow season 7, episode 18, “Lost Canary”. The story of Arrow season 7 has centered around strong women in both its storylines, with an entire team of Canaries protecting the Star City of 2040 and the women of Team Arrow finding power in new roles as Dinah Drake became Captain of the SCPD and Felicity Smoak became a mother.
The present day storyline saw a manhunt begin for Black Siren, who had been accused of murder and returned to her wicked ways and teaming with a terrorist known as the Shadow Thief, after several months posing as Laurel Lance and serving as Star City’s District Attorney. Felicity believed that the Laurel of Earth-2 could still find redemption and called in Sara Lance, the White Canary, to try and help talk some sense into her. However, Dinah was not convinced of Black Siren’s innocence and was determined to finally bring down the career criminal who killed her boyfriend.
A different sort of manhunt was carried out in Arrow’s flashforward storyline. It was here that the Canary Network came under fire following the team’s raid on the headquarters of corrupt company Galaxy One. With their scheme to blow up Star City thwarted, Galaxy One attacked the many “Nests” used by the Canaries, killing many of Dinah’s field-agents. This prompted Dinah to speak to Oliver’s daughter, Mia and explain the history of how the Canaries were founded and what it had to do with a fight that occurred over two decades earlier. While this explained some things about the future timeline, there are still other questions that demand answers in the wake of the conclusion of “Lost Canary”.
4. Who Is The Shadow Thief?
Fired from her position as District Attorney and accused of a murder she didn’t commit, Black Siren was quick to seek out old friends from her days as Ricardo Diaz’s lover and muscle. This led her to propose a partnership with Aviva Metula - a former Mossad agent turned freelance thief and terrorist, with whom she had worked at some point while in Diaz’s employ. Known as the Shadow Thief, Metula was agreeable to the partnership and the two quickly began robbing various criminal enterprises that Black Siren had investigated while acting as the District Attorney.
There have been several criminals who have used the alias Shadow Thief over the years. The first and most famous was Carl Sands - a career criminal who was rewarded with an special suit that allowed him to transform into a living shadow, becoming intangible and invisible at will, after he saved the life of an alien explorer. Sands would go on to become a frequent enemy of Hawkman. The second Shadow Thief, a man named Carl Banner, only appeared in a single issue of Vigilante. He also had a special suit, but his only allowed him to become invisible in deep shadows - not incorporeal.
The current Shadow Thief in DC Comics’ Rebirth reality is a former Mossad agent named Aviva Metula who went rogue due to her fears of aliens with advanced technology invading the Earth. She began fighting back with a stolen “Shadow Skin” that allowed her to become invisible and intangible, as well as being capable of flight, teleportation and limited shape-shifting. While this character seemingly gave her name and background to the Arrowverse version of Shadow Thief, they don’t share the same power set. The Shadow Thief that joins forces with Black Siren does wear a special suit, but it’s filled with more mundane tools like an electronic safe-cracker and a scanner that can detect certain valuable materials.
3. Is Felicity Smoak Bisexual?
One of the better scenes of “Lost Canary” sees Felicity Smoak and Sara Lance taking a moment to catch up in Team Arrow’s bunker, as Sara gets in a quick workout on the salmon ladder. The two discuss how they haven’t really had a chance to talk like they used to back when they were the only two women on Team Arrow and Sara says that Felicity has come a long way since she was “the I.T. girl secretly crushing on Oliver Queen.”
Felicity dismisses this, saying that it was hardly a secret and that she has the worst poker face in the world. She then coyly asks, on that note, if Sara had been flirting with her all the times she said that Felicity looked cute five years earlier. Sara smiles back and asks if she was into it. Felicity confirms that she was, saying “Of course. It’s you!”
While this may seem to have come out of left-field, this scene is a clever nod to the Birds of Prey comics written by fan-favorite writer Gail Simone, which inspired much of Sara Lance and Felicity Smoak’s characters on Arrow. Simone once stated that she considered Black Canary to be bisexual and wrote a line to that effect, where Dinah described herself as “75% heterosexual.” This was used as the basis for Sara’s sexuality on Arrow.
While never confirmed outright, Simone also hinted that Barbara “Oracle” Gordon and Black Canary might be friends with benefits, if not an outright romantic couple at one point. Certainly Black Canary put Barbara on equal-footing with Green Arrow when she asked Huntress to give her love to both of them before going into a situation she wasn’t sure she’d return from. With Felicity having been set up at one point to become the Oracle of the Arrowverse, the connection is clear.
Page 2 of 2: Even More Questions From Arrow’s “Last Canary” Episode
2. What About The Crimes Black Siren Actually Committed?
Black Siren is eventually convinced to turn her back on Shadow Thief, after the duo prepare to steal a weapon for an unnamed buyer and Felicity, Sara, and Dinah refuse to move out of Black Siren’s way unless she’s prepared to kill them all. This leads to Team Arrow somehow finding a way to clear the name of Laurel Lance, since Felicity was able to clear Black Siren of the murder charges that led to her being fired. At the same time, Dinah is somehow able to explain away Black Siren’s actions with Shadow Thief as being part of an undercover operation that nobody else had known about.
Ignoring how quickly Dinah is to forgive the woman who murdered her boyfriend in cold-blood, this doesn’t make a lick of sense. Even if Dinah could sell the lie of Black Siren’s secret undercover mission to the District Attorney’s Office and the SCPD, there would still have to be a lengthy investigation given that several criminals had been killed during the course of Laurel’s fake investigation. Presumably there would also be a large number of protocols regarding this kind of sting that would have been totally ignored in this case. And all of this ignores the evidence that leaked to Channel 52 News, which showed Black Siren working with Ricardo Diaz a year earlier, before she was employed as the District Attorney.
1. How Is Black Siren Supposed To Get Back To Earth-2?
Despite being apparently free to resume pretending to be Star City’s District Attorney, Black Siren elects to go back to Earth-2. This decision comes after a talk with Sara Lance, where Sara advised Black Siren that she can’t really become a new person until she goes back home and confronts who she was. To that end, Black Siren decides that she should return to her home dimension and build a new life there instead of pretending to be someone she isn’t on Earth-1.
There’s just one small problem with that plan. Dimensional travel is not as commonplace on Earth-1 as it is elsewhere in the multiverse. You need to have access to certain advanced technology or certain superpowers, like super-speed or the power to open breaches between Earths. On Earth-1, this means dealing with STAR Labs.
That’s something of a problem if you’re Black Siren and all of your experiences with Team Flash involved trying to kill them and their loved ones, even if Felicity was willing to vouch for her. Cisco Ramon is well-known for holding a grudge over this sort of thing, having spent the first half of The Flash season 3 not speaking to his former best friend Barry Allen, due to Barry’s travels through time accidentally killing Cisco’s brother. And considering that Barry is the sort of morally-strict soul that just threw his own daughter in prison for associating with the Reverse-Flash, it’s a safe bet that Black Siren would be locked up in STAR Labs’ pipeline before she had a chance to ask anyone on Arrow’s sister series for help, given her status as a former lieutenant of the killer speedster Zoom.
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