Arrow Season 8 Premiere Review: 10 Ups & 3 Downs From 'Starling City'

Downs...

3. The Flash-Forwards Felt Half-Baked

One of the most exciting non-Crisis elements of the final season is the reintroduction of Future Team Arrow, as Katherine McNamara's Mia Smoak, Ben Lewis' William Clayton-Queen, Joseph David-Jones' Connor Hawke and Andrea Sixtos' Zoe Ramirez (the first three of whom are now series regulars) all set out on establishing themselves as the heroes that future Star City needed. But while it was indeed great to see them again, their arc suffered from too little screen-time.

Mia acting out and Connor assuming control do seem like logical character journeys, but they reached their destinations far too quickly without much time for real development. And considering that Connor's brother, JJ, is going to be appearing regularly, it would have been nice to see a little more than one or two minutes of cliche killer one-liners.

It's hard to critique the episode for giving its secondary narrative a lack of screen time when its primary storyline is obviously the far more compelling one, but this does leave a lot of us wondering if the show is capable of pulling off the dual-narrative format when it's so occupied with telling a story as game-changing as the Crisis.