10 Radical Ideas To Save Arrow

Arrow was a bit of an eye-opener when it debuted in October 2012. Darker and more dynamic than anyone expected a Green Arrow adaptation would be, season one of the show still had its ups and downs, but the quality was apparent even as the show found its feet.

Star Stephen Amell was formidably physical in the title role, giving billionaire playboy Oliver Queen a grim, relentless presence, while John Barrowman was wickedly sinister as Merlyn, the villain of the piece. There was a clear debt owed to the Dark Knight Trilogy in the show’s driven, brooding superheroics, the narrative just as grounded in reality.

Season two built on that rewarding early promise to deliver one of the best sophomore seasons ever delivered by a genre show. The storytelling was paced beautifully, the flashback scenes to Oliver’s dark past meshing seamlessly with the action going on in the present day, and Manu Bennett’s antagonist, Slade ‘Deathstroke’ Wilson, was pitch perfect: charismatic, dangerous and utterly terrifying.

So where did it all go wrong? Arrow's third and fourth seasons have seen a marked plunge in quality, with generic fight scenes taking the place of the usual breakneck action, plot sacrificed for melodrama, superfluous flashbacks, and childish, inconsistent characterisation.

And the fanbase has noticed: online engagement has taken on a bitter, angry slant in the last year. With the show’s renewal for a fifth season, can Arrow be dragged out of the doldrums? Naturally it can. Here’s how (and here also be spoilers).

To begin with, the flashbacks in every episode were vital to the show’s narrative, but that hasn't been the case now for two years.

Interviews with the showrunners, Marc Guggenheim and Wendy Mericle, have revealed that they know that the flashbacks have gotten dull and pointless. They believe that season five will be different, because they’re headed towards an endgame: the flashbacks are getting closer to the point we started out at in the pilot, with a tattered, hobo-haired Oliver being rescued from Lian Yu.

The problem is that they said more or less the same thing last year, and nothing’s changed. Season three's flashbacks told a worthless story over an entire season: a story that could have been told in four episodes.

This year has repeated that mistake and worse (which I'll talk about in a moment). Now we’re told that season five will take us to Russia for the Bratva back story that people were curious about in season one.

And that's the point - we were curious. Back in season one. Four years later, we could care less how Oliver Queen became a captain in the Russian mafia, where he got the ink, how he learned to speak Russian. It’s been a fait accompli for too long now, and hasn’t been mentioned since. He just did; let’s leave it at that.

Enough’s enough. We don’t need the flashbacks anymore. Mericle says “it would be weird” to ditch them completely. Maybe for you, Wendy. The rest of us would be over the moon.