Arrow season 7, episode 11, “Sins Past”, was largely focused upon the mistakes of bygone days. For some characters, this meant facing their own misdeeds. For others, it meant tackling the crimes of other people and attempting to save their friends and themselves from crossing the line and losing their souls in the process.
The main plot of the latest Arrow episode saw Oliver Queen once again confronting the sins of his family, trying to convince his half-sister Emiko Queen and himself that he had become a different sort of man than the one their father had been. Unfortunately, a new criminal was just as determined to prove that Oliver Queen was as selfish as his famously criminal father and committed a series of crimes to force the former Green Arrow to quit his new job with the police department. At the same time, Black Siren, who is still masquerading as the Laurel Lance of Earth-One, was confronted by a ghost from her past. She was seemingly stalked and harassed by the first man she had ever killed shortly after gaining her metahuman powers on Earth-Two. Reluctantly, she finally turned to Felicity Smoak for help and confessed the dark secret that helped drive her to a life of crime.
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Meanwhile, back at ARGUS, John Diggle moved forward with his plans to reactivate the Ghost Initiative program. He did this despite the objections that Curtis Holt had regarding offering convicted super-criminals (particularly the recently captured Ricardo Diaz) a chance at earning time off their sentences in exchange for working on potentially lethal covert missions on behalf of the United States Government. He also had issues with putting bombs in their heads, forcing them to cooperate under the threat of death. While Digg thought it was the only way they could track down the mysterious figure called Dante without tipping off his superiors at the Department of Defense, Curtis wanted to try and find a better way. With all of this in mind, here are the big questions fans are asking after the latest episode of Arrow season 7.
- This Page: Questions About Black Siren Page 2: Other Questions About Arrow Season 7
8. What Do We Really Know About Black Siren’s Background?
“Sins Past” offered the first bit of information in some time regarding Black Siren’s history before she came to Earth-One. One of the chief criticisms of the character has been how poorly defined she has been, despite having existed since The Flash season 2, where she first appeared as part of the entourage of the sinister speedster Zoom. Indeed, Black Siren’s backstory on Earth-Two has been so poorly defined that we don’t know anything about her mother or if she had a younger sister like the Sara Lance of Earth-One.
We know that Black Siren’s father died on her 13th birthday, killed by a drunk driver while he was picking up a cake from her favorite bakery. Like the Laurel Lance of Earth-One, she met Oliver Queen and fell in love with him. When her Oliver Queen was presumed lost at sea, she fell into a deep depression and moved to Central City to start a new life, where her metagene awakened when the particle accelerator of Earth-Two’s version of STAR Labs exploded. Beyond that, we know nothing except that she never went to college, never earned any kind of degree, never learned how to write a resume and apparently used her looks to manipulate people into giving her what she wanted, according to an off-hand remark in the Arrow season 6 episode “The Dragon.”
“Sins Past” puts a twist on the story of her father’s death, revealing that it was Black Siren’s fault that her father died. She confesses to Felicity that her father had forgotten to get her cake on her birthday and that he went back out to get it after she, in her own words, “threw a tantrum.” Indeed, the last thing she ever said to him before he drove off to his death was the words “I hate you.”
7. Why Is Black Siren So Popular As DA?
At one point when she is meeting Felicity for drinks, Black Siren overhears a news report which says that she has the highest approval rating of any Star City District Attorney within the past decade. This doesn’t seem to make any sense, given how the real Laurel Lance’s background as the vigilante Black Canary is public knowledge and the new government of Star City took power on a strict anti-vigilante platform. With the exception of the working-class people in The Glades, the people of Star City seem to hold a low opinion of their costumed crime-fighters and they voted overwhelmingly in favor of stricter laws punishing vigilantism. In fact, a poll later in the episode reveals that 77% of Star City’s population disapproves of Oliver Queen working as a special deputy for the Star City Police Department. As such, it’s hard to see how Black Siren got the job of District Attorney, much less why she’d be so well-liked.
On the other hand, it’s not like being the best District Attorney Star City has had in the past decade is a high hurdle to jump. Not counting Black Siren, the city has had eight District Attorneys in the past ten years. Of those, one of them was a card-carrying super-villain (Arrow season 5’s big-bad Prometheus) and all but one of the rest were corrupt to varying degrees, with no less than half of them being in the employ of Damien Darhk or Ricardo Diaz. The one exception, a woman named Suzanne, was killed by Damien Darhk.
6. Will Black Siren’s True Identity Be Exposed?
Given that Black Siren’s subplot in this episode was built around her fears of being exposed by someone who knows her from Earth-Two, it raises the distinct possibility she will be exposed later in Arrow season 7. Certainly, Black Siren seems to care little for maintaining the pretense of acting like the Earth-One Laurel Lance, as this episode sees her drinking in public when her alter ego was publicly known as a recovering alcoholic. Black Siren is also a fugitive from ARGUS custody, having been broken out of prison by Prometheus back in Arrow’s fifth season. Even if it continues to be more trouble than it is worth for someone at ARGUS to decide to make Black Siren “disappear” in the same way as other people the organization has found problematic in the past, the body of Earth-One’s Laurel Lance is still buried in a cemetery somewhere in Star City. This could lead to uncomfortable complications should someone ask questions about Black Siren’s claims that her death was faked and that she was held hostage for two years and the grave is exhumed.
5. Will The Writers Stop Trying To Make Black Siren’s Redemption A Thing?
One of the most aggravating aspects of Arrow season 6 was how the show’s writers kept teasing the question of whether or not the Black Siren was honestly trying to better herself. For the majority of the season, the answer was a firm no, but the possibility of a redemption arc kept being dangled even as Black Siren joined one villainous group after another and continued to kill people with no signs of regret. This changed in the first half of season 7, where the character began to be written as more of an anti-hero - a take on the character, reminiscent of Killer Frost in the most recent seasons of The Flash, that seemed more natural and was better played by actress Katie Cassidy.
With this latest Arrow episode, however, it seems that the writers are back to trying to push the idea of Black Siren really not being that bad a person, ignoring the fact that she’s killed on multiple occasions within the past year and not shown any real remorse for it.
Page 2 of 2: Other Questions About Arrow Season 7, Episode 11
4. Seriously, Why Can’t They Use The Name Suicide Squad?
When John Diggle proposed reactivating a government program called the Ghost Initiative in Arrow’s midseason premiere, many fans wondered why a new name was being given to the Suicide Squad. It was clear that the Ghost Initiative - a program that sent convicted supervillains with bombs in their heads out as agents on special missions requiring plausible deniability - was Task Force X in all but name. The answer came in “Sins Past,” after Curtis Holt learned about what John Diggle had done and outright said “The Ghost Initiative is just a cooler-sounding name for Suicide S-,” being cut off by ARGUS Director Lyla Michaels before he could finish saying the second word. It seems clear then that the reason for the name change is due to some edict by Warner Bros, who still do not want any brand dilution distracting from the Suicide Squad film franchise.
3. Will Curtis Join Rene and Emiko On The New Team Arrow?
Over the course of the latest Arrow episode, Curtis is able to trick Ricardo Diaz into giving ARGUS the information they need to track down the mystery criminal financier known as Dante, thanks to an incredibly realistic virtual reality program of his own design. Despite this, John Diggle is still determined to keep the Ghost Initiative running as they may need known criminals to act as boots in the field as part of the operation to bring Dante down. This leads to Curtis declaring that he’s not going to blindly follow Diggle’s orders anymore and that he intends to call his own shots from now on. Based on this and his working with Rene Ramirez and Emiko Queen in “I Am Emiko Queen,” it seems likely that Mister Terrific will soon be coming out of retirement.
2. Who Is The Vigilante Stalker?
The final scene of “Sins Past” shows Dinah Drake discovering a threatening note in her car. This letter is crafted in the same style as the threatening letters that Black Siren received over the course of the episode that she thought were the world of a stalker from Earth-Two. This suggests that someone else is stalking several of Star City’s former vigilantes and has inside knowledge of who they are. So who is this new menace?
The most likely guess is Stanley Dover - Oliver Queen’s sidekick in prison, who was revealed to be a far more sinister figure than he seemed at first glance. Dover escaped from prison the same day that Oliver Queen was released and did show signs of having a genius-level intellect behind his mousy facade. With what information he learned from Oliver about his life as a vigilante, it’s possible he could have guessed that Dinah Drake was the new Black Canary and decided to target her as well as Black Siren.
1. Why Were There No Flash-Forwards This Week?
For some reason, there were no scenes set in the future of Star City 2038 in Arrow season 7, episode 11. It seems likely this was because there was already a lot going on in this episode with three subplots in the modern-day storyline. Also, Dinah Drake was a major presence in the current-day scenes in “Sins Past”, which likely would have limited the time in which Juliana Harkavy (the one actor who holds major roles in both storylines so far) would be available for filming any of the scenes set in the future.
