Over the course of season three, my opinion on The CW’s Arrow drifted from “Well, this show is
problematic, but there’s tons of potential here, and I sure do like this cast”
to “This is half-assed and sloppy, and I’m wasting my time.” Is it a hopeless
case? Yeah, probably; I’m not going to bother watching it (or doing my illustrated recaps) any more, because I
don’t have any faith it’ll improve. Still, here are my suggestions for what the
show would need to do to claw its way back up into the general realm of
“watchable”.
1. Give Oliver a
personality. Okay, sure, I guess “moody, entitled douchebag” is a
personality, of sorts, but viewers deserve more from the main character of an
action series. Apart from his remarkable physicality, Oliver is a feeble excuse
for a protagonist. In the beginning of the series, this made sense: he was a
spoiled, feckless party boy who endured a dehumanizing trauma that turned him
into a soulless, personality-free killer. Hey, that’s sort of interesting!
There’s something in that worth exploring, at least. Three years on, though, Oliver
has barely evolved past that point, and it’s grown tedious. He’s not even
enough of a raging asshole for that to be his defining character trait (after
all, some of the very best fictional characters are raging assholes). Instead,
he’s just perpetually sour and unpleasant, like room-temperature yogurt. On a
season that brought us two effortlessly charming and charismatic supporting
superheroes in Brandon Routh’s Atom and Colton Haynes’s Arsenal, it was hard
not to wonder why we were spending so much time focusing on the moody douche
instead of on either of those aforementioned cuties. It’s time to make Oliver
smart, or witty, or compassionate, or acerbic or arrogant or introspective or
awkward. He needs some key character trait, something—anything!—to justify
keeping him at the heart of the series. Because no one wants to watch a show
about room-temperature yogurt.
2. Caffeinate the
actors. I like all the cast members, every last one. They’re cute. They’re
talented. They seem like swell people. They’re all cheerful and fun on Twitter and
Instagram and such. But snakes alive, that cast has problems with flagging
energy; Stephen Amell in particular often seems to be sleepwalking on set. Amell
has had some strong moments as Oliver, but were I in charge of Arrow, I would’ve strongly considered
replacing him early on for his decision to deliver his opening monologue—the one
that starts out “My name is Oliver Queen...”, the one that plays at the start
of every single episode—in a bored
and vaguely irritated sing-song. Over the course of the show, he’s recorded
several different variants on that monologue; they all start out with “My name
is Oliver Queen…”, and he sounds bored and testy in each and every one. It gets
the show off to a rough start.
3. Give Felicity her
spine and her soul back. Oh, Felicity. You used to be so great! You were
smart and funny and cute and fresh, and audiences went crazy for you. And then… this season happened. Producers shoehorned
you into an ill-fitting romance with Oliver, and you quickly became awful. You
were alarmingly incompetent. You sobbed all the time. You threw tantrums. You
deliberately sabotaged Diggle and Roy in the middle of a dangerous mission, and
then quit the team in a huff when they called you on your crap. You became willfully
self-absorbed and selfish, and you were a total jerk to your nice mom. That
most of this damage to your character was done because of your single-minded,
obsessive, improbable love of Oliver,
for crying out loud, is ridiculous. I’m sorry the show did that to you, kiddo.
You deserved better.
4. Knock it off with
the sexism. Ray Palmer entices the chief technical officer of his
multibillion-dollar corporation into going out on a date with him by giving her
the whole Pretty Woman treatment: he
buys her a fancy dress and loans her diamonds. It works! By the end of the
evening, Felicity is smitten! This is… problematic. Sure, some women love
jewels and couture. Some men do, too. Nothing wrong with that. But prior to
this episode, we’d seen nothing to indicate that Felicity would go crazy for couture or jewels, and Arrow’s assumption that this would be a
surefire way to her heart—and thus, by extension, every woman’s heart—came off
as sexist and gross. It didn’t help that this came in an episode where Thea is
successfully wooed by an obnoxious DJ who uses insults and general assholery to
worm his way into her affections. Was this as sexist and gross as the
show-crippling blunder early in the second season when Oliver forced Felicity—elite
tech whiz, MIT grad, all-around smartypants—to be his executive assistant
because he needed (ahem) a “Girl Friday”*? Not even close, but it still wasn’t
good.
*There’s so much
to unpack in that: That the Arrow
creative minds think “Girl Friday” is an acceptable term to use in a professional
corporate environment in this day and age, that Oliver assumes his executive
assistant must be female, that he forces that job upon Felicity despite her
lack of interest or qualifications simply because she’s in possession of a
vagina, that he’s nasty and condescending to her when she raises valid objections
to this crap… It still boggles the mind that anyone thought that plotline was a
good idea.
5. Make the show
sexier. Holy crap, Arrow has an
attractive cast. So many fit, beautiful actors scampering about in tight
leather costumes! This should be one of the sexiest shows around, and yet most
of the time it somehow manages to be profoundly
unsexy. This is never more true than in the actual sex scenes, like the one in
which Oliver and Felicity, after a season spent pining for each other,
joylessly bone away in Ra’s al Ghul’s lair. It’s not as though Felicity and
Oliver haven’t had sexy moments together: Remember Oliver swinging in on a rope
to save Felicity from a landmine early in season two? That was pretty hot! You
can see why fans wanted them to pair up! But as soon as the Arrow powers-that-be decided Felicity
and Oliver should become an item, they drained all the sexy freewheeling fun
from the pairing, until their dynamic became nothing but tears and tantrums and
squabbling and pining, punctuated by that single bout of joyless boning (Oliver
and Laurel’s relationship in season one, by the way, followed much the same
trajectory, down to that single bout of joyless boning). Sexiness is about
intimacy, about unexpected connections between characters. Arrow’s genuinely sexy moments tend to come out of left field: Laurel
introducing a skeptical Nyssa to the joys of French fries and milkshakes, for
instance, ended up being far sexier than anything Oliver and Felicity did
together this season.
6. Kill the
flashbacks. The flashbacks have always been awful, sure, but at least the
island-centric ones in the first two seasons were helped out by the
always-welcome presence of Slade Wilson. Season three’s Hong Kong flashbacks
were nonsensical (Tatsu giving Oliver a third of her dead son’s cremated ashes is
one of Arrow’s all-time biggest moments
of WTFery), improbable (the U.S. Army tries to decimate mainland China by
releasing a deadly virus on… an island), and offensive (to recreate Hong Kong, a
glittering high-tech metropolis with a population of over seven million, set
designers hung paper lanterns above dirt floors and rickety wooden stalls
somewhere on a studio lot in Vancouver). Nobody
likes the flashbacks. At best, they add little of substance to the current-day
plot; at worst, they bring the show crashing down in a flaming heap of crap.
7. Make deaths stick.
Malcolm died, except he didn’t. Roy
died, except he didn’t. Slade died, except he didn’t. Oliver died, except he
didn’t. And hey, spoiler alert, you know how Sara Lance got riddled with arrows
and toppled to her death off of a building at the start of the third season?
Yeah, as it turns out, she’s going to be just fine. Arrow, maybe don’t do this so much? I mean, I’m thrilled that
Malcolm and Slade and Roy are all still alive, because they’re awesome, but
don’t kill off characters in the first place if you aren’t planning to make it permanent.
It’s the sort of thing that destroys the fabric of a show over time, because
subsequent character deaths can’t pack much emotional punch if viewers assume
any damage will be quickly undone.
8. Get a better
villain. Granted, it’s hard to follow in the powerful and charismatic
footsteps of Slade Wilson (Manu Bennett, you are amazing). And it’s already an iffy
decision to turn Ra’s al Ghul, Arabian-born nomadic leader of the dreaded
League of Assassins, into a boring white dude. Yeah, sure, Arrow’s not the first high-profile DC Comics property to take this
path (hello, Liam Neeson!), but it’s not exactly an innovative approach.
Anyway, Arrow already has a boring
white dude, and his name is Oliver Queen. One per show is plenty. Despite all
that, Ra’s got off to a pretty good start on Arrow. Remember when he whipped off his shirt, impaled Oliver on
his sword, and kicked him off an icy cliff to his presumed death? That was
great! Way to go, Ra’s al Ghul! Alas, after that, he became a messy,
ineffectual, unpleasant enigma. Under Ra’s sloppy leadership, the aims of the
League seemed to change from episode to episode—one week, they’re an
all-powerful force, effecting vital change in the world through brutal and
sometimes supernatural means; the next week, they’re a gaggle of pointless
sadists. By the time Ra’s was forcing his lesbian daughter to marry Oliver and
convincing Felicity to bone Oliver and offhandedly mentioning his penchant for
rape, it was pretty clear he’d lost the plot somewhere along the line. What did
Ra’s truly want? What were his overarching goals? These questions should’ve been
answered in season three. At this point, hopefully we’ll never find out,
because hopefully Ra’s is dead and gone. But this is Arrow. He’ll be back. Of
course he’ll be back.
9. Bring Roy Roy was great! He was witty and competent and
sexy and fun, he looked great in fetishistic red leather, and he radiated basic
human decency out of his flawless pores. In his absence, I’m happy to see Thea
don his costume and pick up his crime-fighting mantle, but the show has been
weakened by his departure. Come back, Colton Haynes; you are sorely missed.
10. Unleash the full
awesomeness of John Barrowman. We’ve gone three seasons, and Malcolm Merlyn
hasn’t sung a single show tune? For shame, Arrow!
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