Its the ones where there’s no smart reason to keep them secret and by keeping them secret things get ridiculously worse, that bug me and Arrow is really good at those. They even throw weak plot devices out there to help Oliver keep his secrets. “If anyone sees you, they die” It just comes off so contrived. Arrow is a good show when its an action show but honestly it is quite poorly written. And for all thats good and holy could someone take out Laurel? The role is terrible and the girl cant act. Its most of the reason why the Felicity/ Oliver dynamic gets so much fan support. People just cant stand Laurel.
To be fair to the girl, I think she’s improved a fair bit as an actress over the course of the series. I hated her for the first series, but I find her ok now.
I actually never had a problem with her. On the other hand, I absolutely loathe Kristin Kreuk because I felt like she was 50% of what made Smallville awful, so I can understand folks not digging a specific character/actor.
Everything except the actors playing the Luthors made Smallville awful. The writing, other casting, all the other actors including that smirking australian underwear model they chose to play Superman, the storylines, everything else about Smallville was simply execrable. To this day I have internal debates whether the show’s lowest point was when Lana Lang was possessed by a witch or the entire episode that was a transparent advertisement for a brand of gum which made whassisname, the token black guy, superpowered.
Pete, that was his name, Pete. They dropped him after season 1 then brought him back to shill for gum. God.
Smallville was the worst. Except the guys playing Lex and particularly Lionel.
Haha yeah, I don’t argue with any of that. I almost skipped Arrow entirely because of Smallville. I’m glad I didn’t of course, but Smallville was THAT BAD.
Realistically, he’s only a problem because a character in this season made him one. Merlyn didn’t want to die for abandoning the League, so he setup his own daughter to catch their ire (killing one of their assassins), knowing her brother would step in to save her, hopefully killing Ra’s and thus saving Merlyn the trouble of fighting him/dying.
Or, in a sense, R’as’s motivations are simple and pretty understandable, given his role. Someone killed one of his order, and their internal code dictates he kill that person. I mean, he’s not concocting crazy schemes or twisting truths or misleading people into their own demise, he’s just backin up his bros in the League.
Doesn’t necessarily make him an “interesting” villain, but I think that’s because, on some level, the real villain this season is Merlyn again. R’as is just the tool Merlyn’s using.
The Iris-thing in Flash is full on stupid now, since Barry seems to have no qualms about showing anyone and everyone else he meets in either of his lives who he is in the other. I think he revealed his identity to 4 or 5 people over the two-episode Firestorm arc alone.
Some of Arrow’s made sense initially, slowly fading with time as more and more people got roped in, but the process was much more gradual there than in Flash. Even some of the lingering secrets (Thea’s until this episode, keeping the whole truth from Laurel even now) honestly kinda make sense from a “No one’s lives will be improved by knowing this shit” kind of standpoint.
Laurel is and has been pretty bad, shoe-horned into the story because the comics say she’s Oliver’s destiny. Her acting’s marginally improved over time (I’ll even say that the scene in the graveyard with her father last week was decent, though that was mostly on Detective Lance’s part), but it’s not like she was green when she took the role–she had a full season arc on Supernatural already, plus other roles, I’m sure. But I mean everything, from the constant ineffective damsel-in-distress-except-when-we-need-to-be-reminded-she’s-secretly-a-badass trope-within-a-trope, the non-existent chemistry between her and either Tommy or Oliver’s actors, and the fact that the writers have forced her into more than half of the interminable/bad “secrets for the sake of CW” plotlines mentioned above make it pretty hard to like the character at all.
The ongoing arc about her feeling like a shitty replacement for her (much cooler) sister is really quite on-the-nose in this regard ;)
I’m glad they don’t seem to be going in a direction where Oliver duels Ra’s again and wins. Or at least I hope not.
I don’t mind Laurel so much now that she’s stopped doing the quivering-lip-feel-sorry-for-me-sigh. My money’s on her disappearing at the end of the season to get some training for the next. Wonder if they’ll introduce Lady Shiva?
Well Im starting to think Arrow is jumping the shark this season. Not a lot I liked about this last episode. It feels like people are doing really stupid things simply to move the plot in the direction the writers want it to go. It feels more manufactured than organic. I really think they need to wrap this season up and narrow the focus back to Starling City.
The big thing in this episode that felt really poor to me was Oliver’s reasoning to go after Merlyn. Your sister’s potential future psych issues around the death of her manipulative, mass-murderer father are a good reason to find her a shrink, not to go charging into certain death at the hands of the guy that damn near killed you recently.
If you ignore that gigantic plot device, the rest of the episode mostly makes sense. Nice to see Ray finally get into the ATOM suit, although it looks a little too Robocop for my taste. And Thea going around speaking the truth to everyone is a nice change of pace, although I have to say I was hoping for Laurel to smack her around a little before they got all friendly again.
Yeah, I feel you on the Merlyn bit, but from the beginning it’s obvious that’s not the real reason Oliver is going, and he admits that as much to Diggle. The plotting could definitely be a little smoother though. Why not have them capture Malcolm and Thea?
I agree on the ATOM suit. It just doesn’t quite fit into the grittier Arrow universe. Just a tad too shiny and high-tech for my tastes. But, we’ll see how it looks when it’s actually in action.
To be fair, Diggle helped Oliver realized he’d also gone charging in in order to prove himself against R’as by defeating him, rather than having the ghost of that lost fight/near-death-experience haunt him for the rest of his career. Which they acknowledged as irrational . . . but also pretty intrinsic to his personality, which I can kind of see.
And yeah, the distinct lack of secret-keeping as of late is turning this from “decently goodish” to “goodly greatish.” If the Flash showrunners can just cut the crap with Iris before S1 wraps, I think the creative team(s?) behind these shows will be in the running for the best block of television superheroism in history.
The whole plot with Ras is ripped off from Batman and poorly implemented at that. Oliver and Diggle go into Namba Parat, the impenetrable fortress, thats never been taken by a frontal assault by skipping down a torch lit path to the front door, fighting off the worlds most dangerous ninjas and archers ( who are apparently trained to miss ) slaughtering their way right into a blatant trap… so Oliver can get a job offer? Couldnt Ras have just sent him a text? And Thea? Totally ridiculous. Would she feel some remorse for turning Malcolm over to the Guild of Inept Assassins Who are Occasionally Adept When The Plot Calls For It? Yes she would…and she would get over it once she realized that Malcolm is a mass murding manipulative a-hole who is responsible for thousands of deaths. I really dont see the whole “dark stain on her soul” thing. Lazy writing to get the plot where they want it. I liked Arrow, in spite of its flaws, but it has become a bad Batman parody.
The “stain on the soul” bullshit was just a lie Oliver tells everyone (including himself) as the reason for going, when really he was just jonesing for a rematch.
As for Namba Parat’s defenses, you gotta figure with something so remote, guard duty would probably go to the most junior assassins as well as the ones you want to punish for something. When nothing happens they die of boredom, and on the odd occasion when the fortress is attacked, they die in droves, but hopefully not before they get the word out of what’s going on. Win-win.
The whole plot with Ras is ripped off from Batman and poorly implemented at that. Oliver and Diggle go into Namba Parat, the impenetrable fortress, thats never been taken by a frontal assault by skipping down a torch lit path to the front door, fighting off the worlds most dangerous ninjas and archers ( who are apparently trained to miss ) slaughtering their way right into a blatant trap… so Oliver can get a job offer? Couldnt Ras have just sent him a text? And Thea? Totally ridiculous. Would she feel some remorse for turning Malcolm over to the Guild of Inept Assassins Who are Occasionally Adept When The Plot Calls For It? Yes she would…and she would get over it once she realized that Malcolm is a mass murding manipulative a-hole who is responsible for thousands of deaths. I really dont see the whole “dark stain on her soul” thing. Lazy writing to get the plot where they want it. I liked Arrow, in spite of its flaws, but it has become a bad Batman parody.
I can also see (on top of the Oliver rematch bit conVurt and I have mentioned) that Oliver’s thinking on Thea may not be entirely clear, either. Slaid said a lot of crazy-person shit to him on the island, but a big chunk of it was about how Merlyn’s training had unlocked something dark inside Thea, and that that darkness would lead to Oliver “losing” her just as he lost the rest of his family and loved ones.
Now, yes, Slaid is a manipulative crazy-person, but he’s also sort of got a straight line-in to Oliver’s psyche by this point in their relationship. Presumably that little quip dug in and festered. If anything, I’m grateful the show hasn’t resorted to banging us over the head with hazy, echoy dream sequence memories of that scene every time Oliver hears Thea’s name. . .
I figured that Ras made it easy for them to infiltrate Namba Parat, as he clearly wanted Oliver there and was expecting him (hence the trap with Merlyn).
You’re right, and I’m glad they did that. It still seems like a poor writing effort, though. There’s so many other ways they could have gotten him out there to face Ras again, without needing to insult the viewer’s intelligence with that “Thea’s fragile psyche” crap.
Yeah, my first reaction to that end scene was “what, he couldn’t find Batman so he’s settling for Arrow?”
Well, to be fair, Batman’s currently about 12, so. . .
I wouldnt want to be part of the entry crew when Ras explained his plan.
“No, I dont want to surround these guys with superior forces and trap them in a stone hewn pathway, Id rather you guys all die so I can fool them into an elaborate trap baited with Merlyn. Ill sell my trap with a multitude of casualties and they will never suspect! Now who wants to volunteer to guard the front door?”
To continue just filling the thread with my glorious presence:
Perhaps only the absolute best assassins were assigned guard duty. They were fast enough to twist and take non-fatal injuries from the arrows and then sell their own deaths, while slowly sneaking up on Oliver+Diggle from behind to close the trap after the passed.