Giant Box of Television: Arrow Season 2

Most of the write-ups of Arrow cite this season as being the high point of the show thus far. Criticisms of seasons 3 and 4 note sloppy storytelling, or trying to pack too much into the show, or mishandling of relationships, but many see season 2 as a near perfect superhero series. Having just finished the whole series (well, up to the current episode), I'm not sure I agree, but I'm also not sure I disagree. I think season 2 is the tightest story arc. The flashbacks to the island impact directly on the contemporary storyline, showing us the descent of Slade Wilson into the Mirakuru-fuelled madness that leads him to put his hands around Starling City's throat. Other flashbacks in other seasons have thematically attempted to follow the main storyline, but this is the only one that has seemed like we were watching one large story told in a non-linear manner. So, for that reason alone, I can understand the privileging that season 2 receives.

It's also where Oliver starts to become a hero, rather than a murderer, the ramifications of which are still being felt on the show. Though the Mike Grell run on Green Arrow that inspired the series shows the character indiscriminately killing, it's hard to reconcile this kind of a "hero" with the larger DCU, which, thankfully, starts to show up a bit more in this season. As I watch the current season (5), I'm conflicted about the character of Oliver Queen. Should he get away with the wholesale slaughter of season 1, simply because he's decided that he's going to be a hero and stop killing? This is obviously what the season 5 villain Prometheus is also asking, which makes us beg the lovely question as to who is really hero and who is really villain in this piece.

But in season 2, Oliver was trying very hard to be a hero, and by the end of the season, he's there, I think. The other great thing about this season is that the supporting cast comes nicely into focus. They spent much of the previous season getting to know one another, but now they're becoming a family. Oliver and John's relationship is one of the nicest homosocial pairings on television, and Felicity Smoak, who for some reason catches a lot of flak from reviewers, is adorably dorky, fiercely intelligent, and super-sexy all at the same time. And don't think Oliver's not noticing.

Villain Slade Wilson is just great. I don't know if it was intentional, but the character bears a lot of similarity to the depiction of Deathstroke in the Teen Titans cartoon from a few years ago. He's brutal and lethal, but also charming and charismatic. He serves as a perfect foil for Oliver in this season, demonstrating the void that remains when someone gives themselves up to despair and death, a lesson that Oliver has to learn in order to emerge on the other side of the season as someone, or something, else.

Giant Box of Television: Arrow Season 1

I was recently inspired to go back and watch Arrow from beginning to...well, not quite end, but to where it's up to now. I didn't get on board with Arrow right away as I was quite annoyed by the idea that they were going to attempt a superhero television show without superheroes. There had been a clear communication from the creators of the show that this was not going to involve all of the things that make a superhero universe wonderful and weird, but rather would be an action show about a guy with a bow.

Thank goodness they got over that.

Once Flash had started on the CW, and I loved it, I decided I should probably familiarize myself with the characters from Arrow  who were popping up every now and again. I'm very glad I did, for many reasons, not least of which is that Stephen "Oliver Queen" Amell is seriously one of the most attractive people on television.

Season 1 of the series is dark. Very, very dark. But it manages to balance that darkness with some deeply human moments, and some very funny moments. Oliver, at this point, has just returned from what the intro to the show calls "5 years in Hell," the end of which we're just now seeing in the current season. It's probably not a stretch to consider this entire season to be a depiction of a man dealing with PTSD in a very extreme way, but one that channels his demons and pain into something better. It also wonderfully sets up a good deal of the moral greyness that follows the character throughout the series, as even now, in the 5th season, the characters are still dealing with the ramifications of Oliver's indiscriminate killing during his first year back in Starling City.

Green Arrow has never been one of my favourite comic characters. Much like Daredevil, I always saw him as a sort of Batman-lite, and in many ways he's treated that way in this series. In fact, some storylines are lifted directly from Batman's corpus (season 3's conflict with R'as al Ghul, for example), and it's easy to watch the show from the perspective of it really being a Batman show. But Oliver Queen has some very different personality traits to Bruce Wayne. Particularly, in this season, we see his deep loyalty to his family, and his eventual acceding to the opinions of others in his mission. His supporting cast grows and develops over the course of the season too, going from background figures in the series to fully-fleshed out individuals all their own. It strikes me that the creators of the series probably initially envisioned it as simply a Batman story but with a green costume, but the characters surround "The Hood," including Starling City, changed it into something else.

Unlike their filmic counterparts, the Arrowverse television shows understand that superhero comics can vacillate from light to dark literally in the space of a panel. There are still cheesy one-liners, sometimes completely out of place, but that's what a superhero universe is. It's simpler than our own. And vastly more complex (fans of DC's pre-Crisis continuity know what I'm talking about). But it's never one or the other, and Arrow does a wonderful job of representing that.