The show opens to our very drunk anti-hero, Oliver Queen, losing the keys to his car at the roulette table. He meets a dark-haired beauty with a dragon tattoo that challenges him to play a game that will satisfy him. She puts three overturned cups in front of him and when he picks the one in the middle, he finds a red pill under it. Echoes of Morpheus as she asks him what he has to lose. He tells her absolutely nothing. He is still on his path of self-destruction that we have witnessed over the last few weeks. He takes the pill and follows her outside of the club. The pill takes effect quickly and he ends up face down in a gutter. When he wakes up, he finds himself in a coffin with a flashlight. He turns it on and sees the words “Game On” scrawled in red.
Back at the Kent Farm, Clark arrives home to find Lois waiting for him. He is dirty and wearing his new black superduds, but superspeeds himself into his civvies before Lois sees him. She is there to do laundry and have a forced movie night with Clark. As Clark begrudgingly goes along with it, he hears some cries of help with his super hearing. (Yes, I know the word “super” is used a lot in this paragraph, but what show are we watching here?) Going out to the kitchen for popcorn, Clark jets it to save a waitress being carjacked. Luckily, Clark saves her in a blur, but she is left with a demolished car as a result. With the dawn of superheroes, Metropolis citizens need to rethink their insurance plans.
When Clark resumes his night with Lois, she seems a bit agitated. It turns out that she and Oliver have a beer pong pact on their respective birthdays. The trouble is, tonight is Oliver’s birthday and he is nowhere to be found. Clark assures her that he is fine and is probably out mixing it up with the ladies. But Lois can’t let it go, so they decide to check his apartment.
Meanwhile, Oliver breaks out of the coffin and finds himself in one of Metropolis’s many abandoned warehouses. He sees another coffin and hears muffles and groans from it. He wipes the dust from the top of it and sees the name “Alexander Luthor” engraved. He busts the coffin open and sees a speaker. Laughter erupts from the speaker and Oliver demands to know who is messing with him. The voice gives him a clue: “Who did you destroy?” Oliver doesn’t have much time to ponder this as a German Sheppard bursts through a window after him. He runs outside and sees a car with a door open. He jumps in the parked car only to have it hit by a semi.
The next morning, Oliver wakes up in a puddle a few feet away from the smashed car. He spots a payphone, but the operator is the woman from the club. “Did you think it would be that easy?” Looking at the stamp on his hand, he decides to go back to the club Roulette, where the game began. He finds the woman there, acting very paranoid. She says she was paid to give him the pill and doesn’t know who is behind it. The club erupts into a brawl, and the woman handily defends herself and Oliver. Standing by the entrance, she holds a hand out to Oliver. “All in?” Oliver takes it and runs outside with her.
The girl’s name is Victoria and she asks him the same question the voice in the warehouse did, “Who did you destroy? Who did you hurt?” Oliver confesses that it could be anyone as gunshots start whizzing by. They make it only so far down the street before Victoria is shot. She dies in Oliver’s arms when the police show up. He tells them they have the wrong guy, but they taze him anyway.
Lois and Clark arrive at Oliver’s apartment. I guess we can only assume they have been driving all night and maybe stopped for coffee and pie? Smallville writers have kept it a mystery how close Smallville is to Metropolis. I mean, no one seems to question how Clark gets to work on time every morning, but doesn’t Lois also live at the Talon?
Lois finds out from a video on Oliver’s laptop that Oliver tried to kill himself at the gala by stepping off the pressure plate. She storms off, mad at Clark for lying to her. Oliver obviously isn’t fine at all. Meanwhile, Oliver is being interrogated by the police when an FBI agent comes in. He says that Oliver was a victim of a con and that he should check his bank account. After logging in to see everything is alright, he freaks out when his money starts to drain away. And for good reason because the man had 3 trillion dollars in there! Holy cow is this guy rich! Clark busts in to reveal that the interrogation room was just another part of the game – a movie set.
Back at the Watchtower, Chloe searches the FBI database to find that Victoria Sinclair, a.k.a. Roulette, has a record. Oliver wants some payback, but when Chloe tells him his weapons are locked away, he vows to respond with the fury of Jackie Chiles. After he leaves, Chloe shows Clark something she found on the video from the gala. The assassin from the future that Clark buried at the Kent Farm is back, younger than before, sporting a Kryptonian tattoo. Clark hands the episode fully over to Oliver’s storyline as he races off to talk to his father.
Lois has been looking around for Oliver and finds his car, presumably the one he lost at the roulette table, parked on the street. She tries to see through the tinted glass when Victoria asks her to get away from her car. Lois then delivers the best line of the night: “Nice try, Vice City, go grand theft someone else’s auto.” This girl has such great zingers! The ladies argue a bit before it turns into fisticuffs. Lois gets a few good hits in before Victoria pulls a gun on her. Cheater.
When we come back from break, Oliver walks back into the Roulette club with a gun. It is abandoned, except for what looks like Victoria sitting at the bar. Oliver almost shoots her, and then chokes. This is good because it was actually Lois in a wig. Victoria steps out with her gun and tells Oliver to drop it. She asks Oliver if he smells kerosene and knocks Lois out. She runs to the back room of the club, and while Oliver tries to revive Lois, he hears an explosion and Victoria’s cries for help.
Oliver finds Victoria surrounded in flames. She is pinned under some rubble and he tries to help her. Then, surprisingly, she slips out easily as the flames die down to nothing and some lights come on. She says, “You kept asking me who did this to you. My question was always the answer. Who did you destroy?” A wall flips around to reveal mirrors. “I hear you’re some kind of hero. One that tried to bury himself. You’ve just proven that hero is still alive, Oliver. Now it’s time to resurrect him.”
It turns out that our own Chloe Sullivan, with some help from the Justice League, was behind all of the shenanigans. She needed him to face his demons and the only way he would was if he was pushed over the edge. Oliver is surprisingly thankful. I’m not exactly sure if I would be if I were in his shoes. That was quite a gamble Chloe took with not only their friendship, but also his life! Chloe tells him, “Even with your face in the gutter, you still had the hero in your heart.” Oliver meets up with Lois later and tells her Victoria was a psycho ex-girlfriend of his. They bond over beer pong.
This show is about Clark Kent, right? We are reminded of this as Clark returns to the Watchtower and tells Chloe that Future Girl is a Kandorian named Alia. Kandor is a city on Krypton and the tattoo was her family crest, much like the symbol on Clark’s super-attire (I couldn’t help it.) Chloe scans satellite images to find these symbols have been emblazoned in many places around the Earth. This must have been what Tess was looking at back in the episode “Rabid”.
At the end, we’re treated to a humorous exchange between the newly-reformed Green Arrow and Sup- I mean, Clark. Oliver pokes a bit of fun at Clark’s outfit. I’m sorry, Green Hoodie-wearing-my-sunglasses-at-night, but look who’s talking! He finally acknowledges the good work Clark has done and officially offers his help. Clark forebodes, “Something tells me soon the world will need all the help we can get.” Finally, now that Oliver’s quest for redemption is over, we can get back to what has been going on in the background – the machinations of Major Zod and his followers.
