Review 662: Arrow (Season 6)

  

It's tough not to be frustrated with the tumultuous quality of Arrow as Season 6 proved. This season marked the show at its most boring and infuriating

Following the devistating explosion on Lian Yu, Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell) returns home to confront a challenge unlike any he's ever faced: Fatherhood. Oliver is determined to embrace this new role while continuing to serve and protect Star City as both its mayor and the Green Arrow. But villains - old and new - Black Siren (Katie Cassidy), Vigilante (Johann Urb), Ricardo Diaz (Kirk Acevedo) and Cayden James (Michael Emerson) and other threaten him on all fronts. And bonds within the ranks of Team Arrow - verteran John Diggle (David Ramsey, Thea Queen (Willa Holland), tech genius Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards), former police captain turned deputy mayor Quentin Lance (Paul Blackthorne), brilliant inventor Curtis Holt (Echo Kellum), along with recruits Rene Ramirez/Wild Dog (Rick Gonzalez) and Dinah Drake (Juliana Harkavy) - have become dangerously decayed.

 

After Season 5 wrapped the series with the litterally explosive finale "Lian Yu" which wrapped the conflict between Oliver Queen and Adrian Chase (Josh Segarra) and left viewers with a jaw dropping cliffhanger which left the fate of every member of Team Arrow up in the air. Unfortunately, things got off to ropey start with the season premire "Fallout" which showed that pretty much every single major character had survived Adrian Chase's explosion and had affected them in no meaningful way as opposed to deliving a dramatic overhaul for the status quo of the show and focussing on Team Arrow broken and reeling from Chase's final attack and that little hand changed in Star City in the last three months and that it was just business as usual.

According to showrunner Wendy Miracle, the primary theme of the season is "Fatherhood" Ollie has finally reached a point where he can no longer maintain a balance between his duties as mayor and his ongoing vigilante crusade. The addition of William to his life also makes that unsustainable.

Oliver realises that he has to make some tough choices about what matters most in his life right now. He finds that being the Green Arrow is no longer as important as being a good mayor and father to William.

 

And while that's certainly an interesting backbone for the season, it doesn't leave a lot of story to tell and when that already thin story has to be stretched out over 23 episodes, it often felt like the show was spinning its wheels. William exists to be a plot device and little else. Oliver just needs to realise that William matters more than his vigilante life, it's not because their dynamic is that interesting. Too often, they feel disconected and uninterested in each other.

 

Another storyline that never really clicked during the first half of the season was Diggle taking over as the Green Arrow for Oliver so he could focus on being a single dad to William and his mayoral duties inspite of his injuries and reliance on painkillers becuase not only is he putting himself and the team at risk in the field but it also came at the detriment of sidelining Ollie for a large majority of the first half of the season.

The first half was marked by a pretty unremarkable overarching narrative with pacing issues and storylines that struggled to gain momentum. The seasonlong storylines lacked the cohesiveness, intigue and impact of previous seasons resulting in a bland viewing experience.

 

A big part of Dinah Drake's character in Season 5 was how the death of her partner Vincent affected her and when the season began, the writers started to give out some more details and eventually tying his fate to the long brewing mystery of who Vigilante was and reveling his identity as said character.

 

This reveal was underwhelming for a number of reasons, for one thing, it calls into question why Vigilante was a such a huge focus in Season 5 in the first place. Tying him into the whole Prometheus conflict seemed to suggest something much more sinister between the two characters. Rather then feeling significant and impactfull, the reveal felt like a very contrived way to send Dinah down a nonsensical path of revenge which was made even more abudantly clear in the later half when her agenda against Black Siren centres around Vincent.

 

Another problem with Season 6 that also became instantly apparent is the main cast. There are too many characters: Team Arrow just felt so crowded which that not every character can shine or get their due. Hell, I even forgot that Curtis became a small business owner and that Rene continued to deal with problems surrounding the custody of his daughter Zoe. I must've found them so uninteresting that I blanked them out. 

 

One aspect that the Season definitely benefited from was the decision to split it between two Big Bads.

But unfortunately, both of them proved to be underwhelming in the long run; The start of the season sees Ollie and Team Arrow having to deal with hacker extraordinaire Cayden James who proved to be an extraordinarily dull villain. I hate it when films and TV try to tackle hacking as a serious topic and that fact that the first Big Bad of the season was an evil hacker just felt like a step backwards into goofiness after Season 5. Emerson is a talented actor as shown through his work as Ben Linus on ABC's Lost and more recently Harold Finch on Person of Interest. But here he looked board and sleepwalked his way through the role that never came alive a genuine threat to Team Arrow.

I read online that James was killed off after Ep 13: The Devil's Greatest Trick because the producers couldn't get Michael Emerson to commit to a full season. That didn't work out either.

 

After the death of James came the elevation of supporting antagonist Ricardo Diaz, a character clearly based on the Richard Dragon character from the Green Arrow comics to Big Bad. Refreshingly at least, he's the first Arrow villain who’s neither motivated by a hatred of the Green Arrow nor by a desire to destroy Star City. Oliver and the Green Arrow are just a nuisance for him to get rid of. Unfortunately, Diaz never felt anymore special than your average crime drama villain. He didn't have any defining characteristics beyond being a soft spoken, shrewd crime boss and his backstory was that he was bullied as an orphan and felt inadiquate.

 

The Team Arrow Civil War that dominated the latter half of the Season was pretty contrived. While spying on his teammates was uncalled for, the fact remains that someone on Team Arrow betrayed them to the FBI and Oliver had to find the traitor ASAP. Given that Artemis betrayed them to Prometheus in Season 5, it isn't unprecedented. For his part, Oliver blindly decides that both Diggle and Felicity would never betray him even though they have over the course of the show and they’ve reconciled their differences; while on New Team Arrow/Outsiders part; Rene disobeyed orders and sold the team out and Dinah immediately went to Vigilante after leaving, despite him being far worse than Oliver even when one doesn’t even know he’s working for James. When James attacks the city in Ep.11: We Fall, they still refuse to work alongside Team Arrow even though James is conducting a cyber attack on the city until the end of the episode and even after all is said and done, Rene bluntly tells Ollie "nothing has changed". And it gets worse in Ep. 13: The Devil’s Greatest Trick, Dinah chooses killing Laurel over saving the city from being bombed by James and willingly believes a blatant lie to justify her crusade later on even though she's supposed to be a cop. She also attacks Quentin, even though he has a heart condition, multiple times without remorse and blames Oliver for Vincent’s fate all the while James evades her wrath.

 

The conflict reached its breaking point for me personally in episode 14: Collision Course, where both sides of Team Arrow finally clashed. The season had clearly been building towards this fight for a while since the mid-season finale but despite all the build up

 

Ep 19: The Dragon which centred on Diaz was pretty dull by Arrow's standards Obviously, this motivates him to gain the power and respect that he was denied as a kid but it came off as cliched and uninspired.

 

With that said, only a small handful of episodes stood out over the course of this season, the Deathstroke two-parter early in the season  this season's episode of the Crisis on Earth-X crossover was also highly entertaining with Team Arrow joining forces with their fellow superheros to repel alt dimension Nazi invasion.

2/5.