As a small
child, by two favorite superheroes were Batman and Captain America. By the time
I learned to read, however, Star Trek
had hit the airwaves and my interests had moved on to science fiction. As a
result, I rarely if ever read comic books. In truth, I never read much of
anything until I was a teenager, and then it was all science fiction—strictly
science fiction. I knew who many of the most popular comic book heroes were, of
course, but I didn’t know too much about most of them. If you would have asked
me as recently as ten years ago which characters were Marvel creations and
which were DC creations, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you.
All of
that changed when Iron Man launched
the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) in 2008. Since then, I have come to know
more about every major Marvel and DC character that has been featured in movies
and television over the past several years than I ever knew before. Not as they
were presented and portrayed in the comic books necessarily—I know that some
changes have been made in the film and television adaptations—but as they have
been presented and portrayed in live-action. This blog entry is the first of
several in which I plan to talk a little bit about what I watch on television.
In it, I write about the first of four programs that share a single DC
Television Universe—actually two universes that exist in parallel, but that’s
just one of the story elements. I promise to be as spoiler-free as possible,
but I can’t promise not to include any spoilers at all.
First
up... ARROW
In a nutshell, Arrow
is the story of Oliver Queen, the once spoiled, self-centered, playboy son of a
very wealthy businessman, the late owner of Queen Consolidated. After having
been missing for five years after he went down with his father’s yacht, during
which time he went through a lot of changes, Oliver returns home to Starling
City to save it from crime and corruption, disguised as a hooded, bow and
arrow-wielding vigilante known at first as “The Hood,” then later as “The
Arrow,” and then eventually as “The Green Arrow.”
I remember hearing around the time when the first season was
going into preproduction that Arrow
was going to be a show about the adult son of a wealthy businessman who is just
as human as the rest of us, who turns vigilante to fight crime and corruption
in a world where superpowers and magic do not exist. That sounded good to me,
but then I also remembered hearing that Enterprise,
which later changed its name to Star
Trek: Enterprise, was not going to make use of any sort of time-travel in
its stories, and that turned out to be about as far from the truth as it
possibly could have been, so I took that statement with a grain of salt, as
they say. Much to my delight, however, Arrow
started out as exactly kind of show that the producers had said it was going to
be—dark and gritty, the way I’d hoped it would be, with no superpowers or
magic. It might have been a little far-fetched in some ways, but events as they
were portrayed early on were not beyond the boundaries of what could really
happen, given the right set of circumstances and the right personalities. It was
a good show.
Eventually, however, it began to change. All good shows do
in some ways and to some extent, but these changes were different. I don’t remember
the specific order in which those changes took place, so if you’re also a fan
and you catch a mistake or six here, I apologize. More and more, and more, DC
characters began to appear and take a little too much of the focus away from the
Oliver Queen/Arrow character. Despite what the producers had said early on, superpowers
and mysticism did slip in. Oliver took on a sidekick, Roy Harper, known as The
Red Arrow, a.k.a. Arsenal (can you say Batman and Robin?). The Black Canary showed
up and turned out to be Laurel Lance’s sister, Sara, who hadn’t died after all.
We learned that she had been trained by Ra’s al Ghul’s League of Assassins
(traditionally a Batman foe). She was eventually killed and then resurrected
via the Lazarus Pit, as was Oliver himself at one point, a fate which Oliver’s
sister Thea also shared sometime after she took over Roy’s role as The Red
Arrow, a.k.a. Speedy. Somewhere along the way, we spent some time with the
Suicide Squad. John Constantine, who investigates matters involving the occult
and sometimes ends up fighting demons, made an appearance (after his own
short-lived series had been cancelled). Actually, I wouldn’t mind seeing
Constantine again. We also met forensic scientist Barry Allen, who, while back
home in Central City, was turned into the Flash after an explosion at Star
Labs, but more about that in Part 2 of this blog. As the series progressed, we
met still more recurring characters and Oliver’s team of vigilantes grew larger,
as it remains to this day.
In my opinion, by the time all of that and more had happened
at the end of season 5, Arrow had
lost something. It was still a pretty good show and I still enjoyed watching it—I
never did consider stopping—but the quality of storytelling had somehow begun to
decline. The Ra’s al Ghul storyline had dragged on for far too long—again, in
my opinion—and the show seemed to no longer be about the Oliver Queen/Arrow
character as much as it had become a vehicle through which to introduce as many
DC heroes and villains as the producers and writers could possibly squeeze into
it. Developing the supporting cast of characters certainly wasn’t a bad thing—I’m
all for character development, as it makes them seem more real...more human—but
I felt as though in doing so to such an extent for such a large number of
characters, the show had lost too much of its focus—that its overall quality
had suffered as a result. I believed that if something didn’t change in season
6, the Arrow quiver was going to very
quickly run out of arrows.
Fortunately, this season, someone refilled that quiver. Yes,
Oliver still has several characters on his team deflecting some of the show’s
focus, and yes, all of those things that I mentioned above are firmly
established parts of the “Arrowverse” that remain in some form or another, but something
wonderful from a storytelling angle has happened as well. The flashbacks that have
been telling the story of Oliver’s five years away from Star (Starling) City
throughout the series have finally caught up to his return home, where the
series began, but that is only one part of what I am referring to. (Yes, I just
ended a sentence with a preposition. Sue me.) As I write this, only a few days
have passed since I watched the episode in which Oliver is held captive and
interrogated by Prometheus, and I have to say that that episode may very well
be the best episode in the entire series so far. I’m talking Emmy-worthy, both
the story itself and lead actor Stephen Amell’s stellar performance. It
presents a major character development moment that, in my opinion, could not
have been timed better.
To Stephen Amell:
If, somehow, you have been made aware of this blog and are reading this, I just
want to say... Well done. Bravo. I am not and never have been a man who seeks the
autographs of or photos with, or otherwise gushes over celebrities, but I have
enjoyed your show from the beginning and I have to say that your performance in
that episode in particular, specifically that moment when Oliver admits to
something, was simply incredible. I am very much looking forward to where you
take the character from here.
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