"Huntress" in Arrow 1x17: "The Huntress Returns"

Yeah not really.

I defended the show's earliest presentation of Helena Bertinelli because it wasn't that far removed from what we saw in the comics, particularly when you factor in the fact that characters in a live-action adaptation are always more violent than their comic counterparts.

Okay. Not always.

But I'm not entirely sure what they showed us this time.

I also cut Show!Helena (Shelena? Helenarrow? HINO?) some slack because she's going after her father, and in Cry for Blood her father is her darkest and most personal kill (even if she doesn't find out he's her father until five-sixths of the way through the story - hey, so the I Am Your Father bit comes at the end of Part Five. I just noticed that). Well, guess what? She's still going after her father. But, um...

Here is a complete tally of the Huntress's casualties during Cry for Blood.
...murders: 0.
...deaths arraged: 1.
...tortures: 0.
...civilians threatened: 0.
...bad guys threatened: 2. (As in, jam a crossbow in his face.)
...people injured outside of fight scenes: 0.
...innocents injured: 0.
...heroes injured: 1. And that's "accidentally shoots Batman with a crossbow bolt," not "deliberately shoots Det. Hall with a shotgun."

That's a phenomenally low body count considering what this storyline represents. Don't get me wrong, Huntress has actually tortured people for information on other occasions...

If you're wondering how Robin can be remotely cool with this, remember that this is 1994, meaning Jean Paul Valley is currently Batman.

...but come on, these are mafia thugs. Look, even if Huntress ever learned Batman's identity, do you think she'd be insane enough to torture Alfred to make Batman do what she wants? I don't. That's going needlessly dark. Go look at that casualty list for Cry for Blood again - she doesn't need to go needlessly dark (hence "needlessly") in order to divorce herself from the more upstanding heroes.

Hey, remember in my last post how I said that Batman was basically a manipulative dick to her in No Man's Land? Well, she thought so too:

Nightwing's weapons of choice are those Eskrima clubs we sometimes see Oliver training with. Just saying.

What if, instead of being a rehash of her last outing, the conflict between them was more personal? She tries to play it his way and he manipulates her, leading to her getting hurt? What if instead of her shooting Hall, Hall had accidentally shot Huntress while trying to arrest her? What if that had kicked Huntress over the edge? (And then you could get more soap-opera drama out of Oliver/Hall because she doesn't know that she shot the girl whose soul Oliver was trying to save.)

So the whole episode starts because Santo Cassamento Frank Bertinelli is about to get a new identity and thus Huntress will miss her chance at revenge. So she's still trying to kill her father. Okay fine, you're still mining Cry for Blood because it's the only Huntress story you ever read (says the guy who's read Robin: Flying Solo, No Man's Land et al, Cry for Blood, and the three extant issues of Batgirl and the Birds of Prey... that's, um, eight-and-a-half Huntress stories, by my count). Fine, but remember this? Here's the entire intro monologue (for context, the first paragraph is given while the police fish a body out of the river, and Batman finds a crossbow bolt in it):

They all think they know me. None of them knows a damn thing. They think they know what I want. Why I do what I do. But they don't. They never have. They've never even tried to find out. He's made it abundantly clear I don't belong. He made up his mind a long time ago. He sees what he wants to see. They all do.
It doesn't matter. What I do, I do alone. That's the Sicilian way. That's omerta. Omerta isn't a mafia oath of silence, like so many people believe. It has nothing to do with cosa nostra. It's something else, related but different. To understand omerta you must understand Sicily. You must understand that Sicily has suffered through invasions and occupations for 2,000 years. That teaches a hard lesson -- that the state is the enemy. For a Sicilian to join the state for justice or revenge is to be called a fool, to be called infame -- a renegade, a rat. You want justice served? You want vengeance taken? You want honor restored? Then you do it yourself. That's omerta. When blood cries for blood, you answer the call. And you answer it alone.

God, I love that writing, I just had to reprint the whole thing.

If you want to adapt Cry for Blood then DON'T F--KING IGNORE THE OPENING MONOLOGUE! Is Helenarrow's Sicilian heritage remotely important to her character? No! Does she try to work alone? No! She goes and blackmails Oliver into helping her. She doesn't work alone, she deliberately antagonizes Bat-stand-in to coerce him into helping her.

Okay, I don't get it. I do not get it. I don't understand what this episode was for. Writing Hall out? (Could have been done in the previous episode; have Deadshot shoot her.) Repairing the Oliver/Tommy relationship? (Maybe. but they didn't need Huntress for either of those things. And it didn't last.) Really, this was the most forgettable episode of the back half of the season.

Wasted opportunity. Sad.