In this episode, instead of having two stories intertwine, we had three: the Starling City story, Oliver being dead in the Frostback Mountains story and the usual flash back we are used to by now. I really didn't think I would see present time/dead Oliver in this episode and I really didn't expect to see Oliver alive at the end either. I found that it was all terribly quick. They surely could have spent a bit more time on the following questions: "did he win or is he dead?" from everybody in Starling and most importantly "how the hell do I retrieve this huge body from a rock I can only access by falling off a mountain" from Maseo. Unfortunately, we didn't get to see much of that or none at all. Maseo just retrieves the body and off he goes. It all seemed very easy and anti climatic to me.
The same was true of the events in Starling City. I thought that the beginning of the episode was quite exciting and I loved to see the gang trying to get by without their leader. It was awfully similar to the Buffy episode called "Anne" (Season 3 Episode 1) where Buffy is in Los Angeles, trying to figure out who she is, and the Scooby gang is left alone in Sunnydale to manage the vampire population on their own. Even more so when Felicity says that they got two out of the three criminals, it reminded me a lot of Xander's line: "we're losing half the vamps". So I liked the beginning of Left Behind. However, I found Diggle and Roy very quick to agree that Oliver was dead and they didn't seem too heart broken about it. When Buffy was gone, Willow and Xander were miserable and Giles was flying everywhere trying to find her. I really thought Diggle would try harder to find out where Oliver was - Malcom had the information - and find out what happened to him.
When they get the news that yes, indeed, Oliver is dead, again, I didn't feel like their world fell apart. Except for Felicity who was slightly sad, I was very surprised by everybody else's reaction. At the end of the episode you find out that Oliver has been brought back to life and that's that. No more suspense. I can understand that it would be quite difficult to go on for several episodes without the eponymous hero of your show but looking at today's television quality, I expected to be teased longer about Oliver's fate. I knew he would come back, obviously, but I wanted to feel a little bit more of a void before being reunited with him. Of course, at the end of Anne, Buffy came back and Season 3 was on its way. When she died at the end of Season 5, she was back at the end of Season 6's first episode. But I missed her much more than I missed Oliver because I saw her friends and everybody else struggling and trying to find a way to get her back. I didn't get that in Arrow. 
I also found that the introduction of a new villain, Brick, was a bit superfluous and that the black Canary, who was said to take over the city with Arsenal and Atom while Oliver was AWOL, had a tiny and irrelevant part in this episode. As a whole, I think that they could have dealt with Oliver's death a bit better, at least giving the fans a bit more longing for the character that, we did see it tonight, makes the entire show.
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