'Arrow': "Three Ghosts" Visit Oliver

Holy mid-season finale… wait, wrong DC comic. This week, Arrow went out with a flash (excuse the pun). When we last left our hooded hero, he was poisoned and things weren't looking great, so Diggle and Felicity called upon good old Barry Allen to bring his incredible chemistry skills to the table to save Oliver. Naturally, Barry came through, employing a little common rat poison to thin Oliver's syrup-like blood. (It was clotting on overdrive from the poison.) Which pretty much catches us up for this week's installment, "Three Ghosts."

As the title would imply, Oliver is visited by three ghosts, but they aren't of Christmas past, present, and future. These ghosts are more from island past (except for TOMMY. Yeah, TOMMY reappears!). Overall, the ghosts (who are really hallucinations) have good advice for Oliver: Live your life, stop with the violent vengeance, it's not your fault when people die, etc. The first ghost is of Shado, the girl from the island. She tells Ollie to let go of his mission and live his life. This is quality advice, but he almost definitely won't take it. The second is Slade, who's… less supportive and more beating the hell out of Ollie. And finally, there's an appearance from Tommy, who absolves Oliver of the responsibility he's felt since his death. Of course, these "ghosts" are all figments of Oliver's deeply disturbed imagination, so they're really his messages to himself.

In honor of the three ghosts of the episode, I bring you the three most important (or at least interesting) things from the fall finale.

1. Roy becomes super. Roy is always getting himself into trouble. Just last week, he crossed the Arrow and earned himself an arrow in the leg. Oliver (as Oliver) helps him dress the wound, throwing in a winking hint that Arrow might have been looking out for him (of course, Roy and Thea aren't buying that one). Now, a little arrow through the leg isn't enough to stop an inquisitive youth like Roy, and he carries on with his mischief-making in the name of helping Starling City. In the process of stealing some files, Roy is apprehended by Blood's goons and injected with the super serum that all of the island flashbacks have been focused on. By the end of the episode, his arrow wound has mysteriously, completely healed and he's well on his way to superhero status.

2. Laurel returns! Laurel has been MIA for a while now (she didn't appear in last week's episode at all, and she's been peripheral at best before that), but she returned this week to help ever so slightly with Thea and Sin's investigation into their friend Max's death. They think Blood's blood drive (yes, really) might have played a role in his death, which the cops wrote off as an overdose. The point here is that Laurel has returned. Is it possible that she might reenter the plot in 2014? At this point, do we even care?

3. Barry Allen becomes the Flash. Okay, so this one might not be important to the Arrow world, but it's definitely interesting. At the end of the episode, Barry returns to Central City to see their particle accelerator in action, when a malfunction and a massive thunderstorm converge to create the perfect circumstances for superherodom. Barry is struck by lightning and thrown into the chemicals in his lab and when he wakes up, we can be sure he'll be the Flash. Will he make another appearance in Starling City? Almost definitely. I'm personally hoping it's sooner than later.

Image: The CW