Review 660: Arrow (Season 3)

 

Arrow struggled throughout Season 3, making bold moves but all too freequently chickening out on them rather than embracing the ramifications and the new status quo bought upon by these series altering moments.

Oliver Queen’s (Stephen Amell) family company Queen Consolidated is sold to businessman, scientist and aspiring hero Ray Palmer (former Superman actor Brandon Routh) who changes the company’s name to Palmer Technologies and hires Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards) as his Vice President. After Sara Lance (Caity Lotz) is found dead, Oliver becomes embroiled in a conflict with Ra’s al Ghul (Matt Nable) the leader of the League of Assassins. Along the way, he struggles to reconnect with his sister Thea Queen (Willa Holland) who has been training with her father Malcolm Merlyn (John Barrowman). Meanwhile Laurel Lance (Katie Cassidy) attempts to follow Sara as the Black Canary and John Diggle (David Ramsey) becomes a father and struggles as a family man.

Initially, everything seemed to fine and the season got off to a promsing start with the premiere episode: The Calm   I'm wasn't entirely happy that Sara was killed off; I felt that there was more that could be done with her. It felt like it was based on shock value, as if the writers wanted a Game of Thrones style death to grab our attention.

From that point onwards, the season descends into a convoluted string of nonsensical plot points, unlikely allys and meandering storylines with no clear sense of plot direction which did make it unpredictable in a way but it also killed any momentum the Season would’ve gained if it were more streamlined.

Arrow (Season 3) felt like a lot of great ideas being executed sloppily. Looked at from a bird's eye view, it should be really cool and dare I say even better than the first two seasons. Oliver Queen and Team Arrow fighting Ra’s al Ghul should be an epic storyline, Oliver being forced into an Enemy Mine with Malcolm Merlyn should be a gripping development filled with intrigue, mystery and danger, Oliver becoming Al Sah-him, Ra's al Ghul's heir and disciple should be an awesome and bold direction to take the show in that would've increased the conflict between the heroes and the League, as well as make us as an audience second guess whether Ollie was good or bad. The results of these storylines should have massive emotional weight and consequences for our characters and yet somehow they don't. Instead the season too often felt like it was wandering aimlessly which left me wandering where it was all going. Despite having some promising ideas, the story of the season is all over the place. There are individual episodes that standout but the story feels unfocused and ultimately like it doesn't go anywhere.

A big problem with Arrow (Season 3) is the pacing. It takes until the mid-season finale "The Climb" for Oliver and the rest of Team Arrow to uncover the mystery of Sara’s murder (spoiler alert), it was Malcolm Merlyn who brainwashed Thea into killing her, all part of some half-baked, convoluted plan to get Ollie to fight Ra’s al Ghul. The revelation came off as an extremely contrived excuse to get Ollie to fight Ra’s. That being said the duel between Ollie and Ra's was certainly solid  but also added that there was a sense of dread that Ollie had thrown himself to the wolves and was in over his head.

The “Brick Trilogy” offered a refreshing change of pace, but ending on Ep 12: Uprising meant that about half the season was over with little progress on the main arc. It also wasted the potential of exploring Starling City and Team Arrow trying to move on from Oliver’s apparent “Death” which only lasted during that trilogy and didn’t have time to be explored in greater detail as a result.

Further confounding matters is that the storylines of Malcolm training Oliver and Ra's framing Ollie for murder and turning the city against him, as a collective were dragged at for 7 episodes at most further dragging the season's narrative down.

Ep 15: Nanda Parbat seemed like it going to shake up the status quo with Ra’s wanting to make Ollie his heir and the following episode “The Offer” did a great job of exploring Ollie’s troubled state of mind and inner conflict. However the following episode “Suicidal Tendencies” forces the main narrative taking a back seat to Diggle, Lyla and the Suicide Squad.

All of this meandering pacing, a batch of subpar episodes (The Return, Guilty and Draw Back Your Bow) only added to the sense that the writers were basically spinning their wheels until they felt comfortable enough to go towards the season's endgame.

It never really felt like the characters were doing anything intelligently, there never seemed to be any strategic planning or  because if you really think about it, the main arc of the season couldn’t have unfolded the way that it did had the characters bothered to be intelligent.

Oliver willingly pulls an Enemy Mine with Malcolm Merlyn despite the fact that he destroyed half his city, instigated the events of the season and very nearly sentenced him to death. Oliver tells his team mates that he needs Merlyn to fight Ra’s al Ghul -  which was exactly what Malcolm Merlyn wanted him to do in the first place. Oliver is just giving what Merlyn wants (being freed from Ra’s al Ghul debt) on a silver platter and nobody seems to realise this.

The primary theme of Season 3, according to showrunners Marc Guggenheim and Andrew Kriesberg, is “Identity”. At the beginning of the Season, Oliver is starting to enjoy the fruits of being a hero, he’s starting to question wether or not he can have a normal life. He's worried that he's becoming increasingly consumed by his persona as the "Arrow" and is loosing his identity as Oliver Queen. The loss of his mother, his family mansion, his company Queen Consolidated and any semblence of a normal life isn't helping matters. As Maseo says "A Man cannot live by two names." But the ways Ollie handles that in practise sounds better than it does in theory.

Other ways the season explores Identity is how Diggle wrestles with the idea of Fatherhood and wether he is a family man or a member of Team Arrow. Thea is forced to wrestle with wether she is a Merlyn or a Queen. The losses that she and Malcom Merlyn have suffered with loosing Moira (her mother) and Tommy (his son) are juxtaposed to each other and

Finally, after Ra’s al Ghul has stripped Oliver of everything that makes up his identity as the Arrow, he finally accepts his offer of being his apprentice, reducing him of a shell of his former self.

Then in the season finale “My Name is Oliver Queen”, we see Oliver fight to reclaim his identity. Sadly, the execution proved to be less than the sum of its parts as the Ollie/Ra's conflict went downhill resulting in finale that was dull and lacking in scope. Once again, a villain emerged to destroy Star City because of personal fued with Oliver. There was just no sense of grandiose scale to the finale, certainly nothing on par with Merlyn's earthquake machine from Season 1 or Deathstroke's war on Star City from Season 2. It felt like a pretty easy threat for Team Arrow to handle.                                                                                        It all boiled down to another one-on-one duel against Ollie and Ra's on top of a dam which proved to be pale imitation of their duel in "The Climb" The fight itself was perfectly perfunctory, as though the two men were simply going through the motions rather than desperately fighting for the fate of an entire city like it should and the identical costumes costumes didn't help as it made the flow of the fight hard to follow.

Ep. 8 "The Brave and the Bold" is a crossover episode with Barry Allen/The Flash (Grant Gustin) which proved to be a particular highlight of the season in large part because of Ollie and Barry's contrasting personas and Amell and Gustin's palapable chemistry. Maybe it's just me but the episode definately felt more like a Flash episode than an Arrow due to its slightly more lighthearted vibe as well as how guest stars Cisco Ramon (Carlos Valdes) and Caitlin Snow (Danielle Panabaker) had expanded roles with Laurel, Thea and Quentin faded into the background.

Oh, I forgot to mention the flashback arc in this review. In the previous two seasons 

Directors Glen Winter, Jesse Warn, Dermott Downs, Gregory Smith, Dwight Little, Doug Aarniokoski, Antonio Negret, Thor Fredenthal, Wendy Stanzler and John Behring's direction is the score by Blake Neely is consistantly rousing, making use of the oriental influences, the production design is splendid, 

Laurel  Her struggle to hide Sara's death from papa Quentin, however, was dragged on much longer than neccesary and definitely. When all else failed throughout Season 3, Laurel definitely shows that she has the heart of the Black Canary.

I do like Brandon Routh as Ray Palmer/Atom but the way they handle his character throughout the season left something to be desired. Routh bought a likeable, charismatic charm to the role and he seems like an interesting character on paper but from the minute he shows up it's clear the writers have no idea what to do with him. His subplot involving him trying to be a hero in a way Oliver as the Arrow could not felt so disconnected from the main conflict of the season and so inconsequential in the long run that it left me wondering what was the point? When his Atom suit makes its debut in Ep. 15: Nanda Parbat, it just turns out to be a low rent Iron Man suit. But honestly, I don’t see why they felt the need to make the Atom suit an Iron Man knock off anyway when in the comics he just has shrinking powers. He’s basically the DC version of Ant-Man.

Katrina Law proves to be  playing Nyssa al Gul, showing just how she's come from being a simple villain of the week in Season 2. The unlikely frienship she forms  Laurel proves to be a good influence on Nyssa throughout the season. She teachers her to live and to be happy. For Nyssa, the world is a place where only the strong survive. Things are very black and white, things are either right or wrong and you either live or you die. She doesn't understand that there's an in-between and through Laurel, she starts to see that there is a grey area and there is room for interpretation.

Matt Nable is also a worthy Big Bad playing Ra's al Ghul. He brings the charm and sense of danger required for such an iconic DC villain and thanks to his background as rugby player, he’s physically imposing and looks like credible threat to Oliver. But as compelling as Ra's was, the overeaching arc of Season 3 frequently came up short and let his character down. Ra's plan took to long to come tro fruition 2  The first two thirds of the season was dominated by Malcolm's blood debut to Ra's  Ra's lacked the personal connection Ollie that made Merlyn and Deathstroke so compelling in the first two seasons. Here, he has absolutely nothing against Oliver, his family or his city and is only a threat because Malcolm set him and Ollie up to collide. Too often, Ra's opperated on a tell don't show principle, never even coming to Starling City until well into the second half of the show robbing him of any agency. In Season 2, Slade doesn’t suit up that much as Deathstroke but he at least felt like a looming presence in Ollie’s life who was going to make good on his promises.

And then, there’s Malcolm Merlyn (John Barrowman). Whereas in the first season he was a legitimate threat to Oliver and his teammates, here he’s relegated to doing whatever the season requires him to do.   In Season 1, he was used sparingly. He was always in the shadows, working behind the scenes as a master manipulator who always played the long game. He was always one step ahead of Ollie and his gang.   Now that Barrowman has been promoted to a series regular, that means he appears in every other episode because the writers clearly caught onto how popular a villain he was. But what they’re missing is that he was such a compelling character is because whenever he was onscreen it was always a surprise. In this season, he's too exposed, he's in the light too much. The season mostly used Malcolm for exposition or spuring on Thea. We gain no new insight into his psychosis and thought process and apart from Ep. 12: Uprising, we almost never see the season from his point of view. His whole plot to get the League of Assassins off his back barely hangs together. It's not something you can logically break down from action to action. This type of writing is really hard to pull off and it made his character far less impactful than he should have.                                                                                                                                                   He was purely a plot device doing whatever the story requires and that’s the beginning and end of his character. 

Another character who felt oddly underutilised was Quentin Lance (Paul Blackthorne) 

To sum up, Arrow (Season 3) has some interesting ideas, some great action even some good character development but never really comes together as a satisfying whole, 2.5/5.

The Anonymous Critic.