Various Thoughts

Let’s just get the remaining Arrow seasons out of the way all at once:

Season 4 – Fantasy elements take center stage this season. Both the present and past main villains are sorcerers, there’s a couple Constantine cameos, a bit more Lazarus Pool fuckery, and a crossover special heavy with Egyptian mythology. It’s not very good… and whomever thought that airing halves of a plot-driven crossover event in different series was a good idea should’ve been fired. Also: Netspeak should never, ever be spoken aloud.

Season 5 – This season introduces a (mostly) new team, trades the boardroom for the mayor’s office, and retreads some of the same ground the first season covered adversary-wise. The fantasy elements are gone, which is a positive, but the new team is worse than the old and once again we have orphaned cross-over episodes (two this time, one featuring a brief creepily perky Supergirl appearance).

Season 6 – Hey, remember that annoying secret identity drama from the first season? Guess what? That just so happens to be the central focus here. The series really should’ve just ended after the first season.

Season 7 – Events here don’t start off very Arrow-like at all. Lot of focus on the police, FBI, and prison side of things… not so much the vigilante side. If this is what you wanted to do, why not just go work on one of the quadrillion existing police procedurals floating around instead? While it does gets more Arrow-y toward the halfway point, it does so in the bad arbitrary way that’s been par for the course in recent seasons and doesn’t drop the police-side perspective until the last quarter or so.

Season 8 – This is more like a miniseries than a proper season. With less than half the length it mainly focuses on a single extremely comicbook plotline (alongside continued flash-forwards and an episode to wrap up the Guild of Assassins subplot). It’s amazing how they could so thoroughly squander the opportunity to finally tell a concise, focused story.

Well, that was an impressive waste of time. On the positive side of things, at least the crossover episodes cured me of any desire to check out Supergirl or Batwoman (never had any plans of watching Flash).

Arrow’s third season starts off decent enough. Rather than unfocused it instead comes across as… unhurried? It knows what it wants to do and does it without any particular fanfare or expository explanations.

While preferable to the ‘pick ideas out of a hat’ methodology the second season had going on, I can’t say the end result is particularly engaging since ‘what it wants to do’ is explicitly contradict its own core premise. Not only is Oliver now ‘poor’ (though functionally there’s no difference) but he was no longer trapped on a island for 5 years; the survivalism flashbacks get replaced by secret agent flashbacks. What’s even the point of this retcon? What does it add besides extreme incredulity? Then there’s the last quarter.

The League of Assassins plotline is dumb. Real dumb. So of course the show has to focus on it 100% for the climax while tossing in some fantasy elements (which appear to become more pronounced in later seasons) and bizarre character behavior. Just because a work is inspired by a comic doesn’t mean it’s required to feature the same sort of nonsense plot developments and schizophrenic characterizations endemic to the medium.