I Watch TV: Arrow

Arrow
 
Arrow’s done now, it took a (solid) B-list comic book superhero, turned it into a successful action-thriller TV show then opened it up into an excellent franchise too complicated to explain*. Ollie was unmasked as the Hood, and the Arrow, and the Green Arrow more than once. Several people have died and come back from the dead. Someone got wiped from the timeline thanks to unrelated events on the show The Flash. Eight years of a TV show are difficult to sum up even when not full comicbook soap opera nonsense.

Season 8 was something of a Greatest Hits, with Ollie having been recruited by the Monitor for the upcoming crisis, and seeing some alternate worlds and also meeting the next generation who have been time-shifted back twenty years. I don’t begrudge them their victory lap.

For several seasons they had the best fight scenes on TV, using the car park and warehouse sets in new and exciting ways; the show had 2-6 fights per episode, almost all of them solid, and usually an interesting one every episode, either a setpiece, a stunt, a gimmick or some complexly tense thing thanks to the weird superhero plots going on.

The best season is season 2. In season 1 the grim Oliver Queen is a murderous vigilante and slowly comes to understand that killing the villains is just creating more violence and he would do better by standing up as a (mostly) non-lethal hero and exposing the bad guys as monsters rather than victims. This culminates in the death of his friend Tommy Merlin and the partial destruction of the Glades in the Undertaking. He vows to do better and stop killing if they got renewed, which they did.

In about episode 4 (I'm not doing a lot of research here), Felicity his IT expert (and not yet his squeeze), is being held hostage at the top of a skyscraper. To save her Ollie has to shoot the hostage-taker with an arrow and he falls out the window and dies. So much for his vow to stop killing.

But he doubles down on this, brooding and rejecting everyone who tells him he didn’t have a choice. He tried harder, works harder, trains harder, accepts help. We reach the season climax with prisoners broken out of jail being dosed with Mirakuru super-soldier serum which turns people violent, and Ollie has to ally with the League of Assassins to stop them. He stands in front of them and declares “No one dies tonight.” Ridiculous Superhero Nonsense, but worked for, built up and earned.

Also in that season, Sarah Lance returns from the dead (she dies in all the three seasons of Arrow she’s in, finally managing to break that streak when she transfers over to Legends of Tomorrow), Deathstroke as the villain, the introduction of super powers, and of course the backdoor pilot of The Flash with pre-Flash Barry Allen coming to Star(ling) City and getting caught up in the Arrow plot.

Watch This: Several seasons of the best fight team on TV, plus superhero soap opera action, some great crossovers with other shows in later seasons
Don’t Watch This: If a brooding knock-off of Batman for 170 episodes sounds like you’d tear your eyes out
Last Year: My review of the superhero arrow-verse shenanigans of the 2018/19 season.

* The conclusion of Arrow coincided with Crisis On Infinite Earths, a crossover event in which the established multiverse was wiped out; unfortunately though each show has basically come through making sense, the whole lot together makes less sense than ever and [SPOILERS] Ollie’s sacrifice fixed the deaths and tragedies of Star City making exactly what happened impossible to know and incidentally making Sarah Lance (now transported to Legends of Tomorrow) have a very complicated love life. Which was always true but now more so.