10 Radical Ideas To Save Arrow
8. Write The Plot For Every Season Before Shooting Begins
This really, really shouldn't be a radical idea. However, the showrunners' recent casual admission that they had no idea who was going to be ‘the body in the grave' when they set up the tease at the beginning of this season indicates a worrying lack of storytelling ability.
Guggenheim and Mericle have admitted that they wrote themselves into a corner, and picked Laurel because they couldn't afford to lose anyone else. You can guarantee that they have no idea what Laurel’s final whispered words to Oliver were either, and will put it off until sometime after next season kicks off. It’s how they ‘work’.
For another horrendous recent example, look at this season again. In the last few episodes, it’s been revealed that Ollie had actually encountered Damien Darhk’s mystical totem years before - yet he doesn't make the connection between the events of his past and the suspiciously similar events of his present. Surely that was the point of the flashback storyline this season: to show that Oliver encountered yesterday something that might help him out today?
Instead, three episodes after they find and filch the thing we get a throwaway line acknowledging that he's seen the idol before. He doesn’t elaborate further, and no one asks, because this line isn’t supposed to open up a new scene of dialogue between characters that fills them in on Oliver’s backstory. It’s a clumsy insert to hide painfully bad plotting errors.
Clearly the season hadn’t been properly sketched out in pre-production, or indeed as it began. They had no idea where the flashbacks were going, or where the main plot was going. This particular gaping hole in the narrative renders the flashback sequences in season four largely irrelevant to the contemporary plot.
These are problems that would be solved if the writing team carefully wrote out narrative beats and arcs for the A-plot and all of the main characters throughout every upcoming season. Novelists do it as a matter of course: why can't these supposedly seasoned writer/producers do likewise?