Skip to content Skip to footer

Arrow S6E12 ‘All for Nothing’ review

In this weeks bleak episode of Arrow, the two factions of team Arrow work together and try to take down Cayden James by locating the bomb he’s holding Star City hostage with, meanwhile Quentin is being followed by Black Siren and Dinah and Vince’s story takes center stage.

In ‘All for Nothing’ Mayor Oliver Queen is getting desperate to bring Cayden James down, as he’s bleeding Star City dry. He brings in team A.R.G.U.S for help, but they all predictably end up being killed by Cayden anyway. Cut to the villain’s secret hideout and he’s having an emergency meeting with his team as he believe’s there’s a mole in their midst, and his attention turns to Vince. But so does Oliver’s and Diggle’s as they corner Vigilante, until team Arrow vol.2 step in and finally tell them he’s their source on Cayden, once again highlighting the divide and conflict between the two groups.

Dinah and Vince’s backstory is the main focal point of this episode as we’re treated to some interesting flashbacks of how they met, their undercover lives, all leading up to the night of the particle accelerator explosion. Plus it was great to see Captain Singh briefly! Vince attempts to help Felicity and Oliver by putting Team Arrow tech in Cayden James’ database so they can retrieve the location of the bomb, but we all know how this is going to end! Vince is caught and tortured by Anatoly, but Felicity finally learns where the bomb’s being held, dividing the two teams once again as Dinah rushes off to save Vince, followed by Rene and Curtis, leaving only Oliver and Diggle to locate the bomb in the huge warehouse.

Dinah fights her way to Vince but turns out it was all a trap (shock, really?!) and the two are both injured in an explosion; leaving Dinah trapped while Cayden James and Black Siren corner Vigilante. Cayden instructs Black Siren to test the limits of Vince’s meta-human powers, leading her to use her canary cry right in his ear, killing him in the process. Cut to Oliver and Diggle as they try to locate the bomb, and they find that Anatoly has used a whole load of hostages tied to another bomb as a distraction, forcing them to abandon their current mission, meaning Vince’s sacrifice was literally all for nothing.

Arrow — “All for Nothing” — Image Number: AR612a_0100.jpg — Pictured: Johann Urb as Sonny Pederson — Photo: Bettina Strauss/The CW — © 2018 The CW Network, LLC. All rights Reserved.

Oliver pays a visit to Dinah to try and make her listen to him, that they must all unit and work together to bring Cayden James down, but he doesn’t apologise. Dinah rightly says that if it was Felicity or William in danger that he would drop everything for them, whereas he seems to view everybody else’s loved ones as collateral damage. Dinah has lost the one person that matted the most to her for the second time, all because of Oliver and Felicity, and she wants vengeance – starting with Laurel.

‘All for Nothing’ was a very dark and bleak episode from start to finish, disappointingly killing off one of the most interesting characters we’ve had for a while since Prometheus. I feel like the writers really didn’t know what to do with Vigilante, so they just used him to lead Dinah back to a very dark place again. I do hope we see Vince again, hopefully his meta-powers will kick in and he’ll return to save Dinah, as we all know heroes don’t stay dead for very long in this show. On a side note, is anyone else getting tired of Quentin trying to replace his own daughter with Black Siren? It’s like he’s forgotten that he actually has another daughter which is pretty insulting, I mean it would be great to see Black Siren get her redemption storyline, but please snap out of it Quentin! This episode also continues to see the growing strength and continued loyalty between Dinah, Rene and Curtis which adds a real sense of family and belonging to the show that seems to have been missing for a while. We also get an interesting development that the footage Cayden has that shows the Green Arrow killing his son has been doctored, the same as the photoshopped image that was given to Agent Watson of an unmasked Oliver. Is Cayden James being played by a larger force…?